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.’
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Jaspers resisted the discourse of alienation. He was skeptical of the idea of true selfhood as it implies a form of ownership over one’s life that he believed impossible, futile, and destructive. The greater problem is not the effacement of the self but the effacement of uncertainty. Jaspers was convinced that I can only be responsible for what I do because I choose freely, in ways that are irreducible to social values, coercive power or nature’s laws of causality. I cannot predict the consequences of my actions, either, given the complex workings of the world. In other words, the grounds of my choices cannot be entirely known. They remain, to speak with Kant, inscrutable. If our lives were not deeply contingent and vulnerable, and if the consequences of our actions were not beyond our control, we would not be able to experience love, freedom, or purpose, nor would we know what it means to be responsible for them.
Freedom, in this sense, is not a resolute commitment to a self I gradually come to discover and realize but an experience of selfhood that simultaneously points beyond itself. I can only be free because I am not omniscient. And I cannot foresee my future in the world because I experience my life as deeply dependent on others. Before thoughtlessness can spread like an epidemic, people actively choose to be thoughtless, they actively pretend to know what they fail to know. ….
...It is banality, not inauthenticity, that conceals this active choice against the uncertainties of human life. Hence, unlike for Heidegger, Jaspers’s conception of thoughtlessness does not obliterate being; instead it obliterates the ground of freedom and responsibility, namely uncertainty—the fact that I “can neither know nor create being” and that I can never be invested in the world as it will be, only in the world as it could be.
2020's Existentialist Turn
It’s a pleasant night in the city. There’s a cool wind and a luminous moon giving off a soft light that trickles down through the buildings and mixes with the hazy but weak street lights. You’re on your way back home through the empty roads, walking in the unsettling silence. It’s unsettling because it’s deep night — the time when dangerous people come out to look for victims. It’s the time for drug deals and murders, for kidnappings and theft. Seeing the familiar figure of another person standing just down the street from you is a heart-pounding affair. There’s no clear way to tell their intentions, no sign that they’re just enjoying the view of the stars or that they have a more insidious plan on their mind. The full moon overhead, you know from watching the news, has been witness to many a person becoming a victim in the surly, uncertain dark. Walking beneath the electric lights draws attention to yourself. The safest option is to keep hidden, avoiding people and assuming the worst of them until daylight arrives. But there’s a difference between the cityscape of Earth and the all-encompassing universe: in the universe daylight will never come to flood the streets, there’s no locked home to go to and no policemen to seek out for safety. There’s only the potential for danger and the inability to know the other civilization’s true intent.
“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life — another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod — there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”
An excerpt from Liu’s novel The Dark Forest, a sequel to the award-winning Three Body Problem. In the novel, the theory becomes an attempt to answer the question of the Fermi Paradox, a problem in science named after physicist Enrico Fermi. It is, in short, an exploration of why we’ve so far seen no signs of alien life when we should statistically be able to see at least 10,000 of them in the universe with 20 of those alien civilizations existing somewhere nearby (on a cosmic scale). .
The Dark Forest Theory of the Universe
In their book The Art of Becoming (2020), the Scottish musicians and psychologists Raymond MacDonald and Graeme Wilson place improvisation at the heart of the human experience. They argue that improvising experiences – both musical and non-musical – shape our identity and our place in the world. We become who we are by how we improvise moment to moment, day to day, year to year. Our identity is the accumulation of these improvised moments. These experiences are housed, felt, endured and enjoyed in our minds and our bodies. Improvising jazz singers show us that deep embodiment of the present moment can transform the mundane into the transcendent. The ability to improvise, to respond with our whole being to each moment creatively, intuitively and joyfully – just like Betty Carter – is the art of becoming fully human.
The jazz singer’s mind shows us how to improvise through life itself
Another significant signal of the transformation of political economies. In many ways many countries have engaged in some form of this during Covid-19.
Universal basic income is the idea that a government should pay a lump sum of money to each of its citizens, usually once a month, regardless of their income or employment status, effectively replacing means-tested benefits.
Germany is set to trial a Universal Basic Income scheme
Starting this week, 120 Germans will receive a form of universal basic income every month for three years.
The volunteers will get monthly payments of €1,200, or about $1,400, as part of a study testing a universal basic income.
The study will compare the experiences of the 120 volunteers with 1,380 people who do not receive the payments.
Supporters say it would reduce inequality and improve well-being, while opponents argue it would be too expensive and discourage work.
This is a vital signal for anyone who cherishes democracy - we need to imbue our technologies with the protections necessary for flourishing societies for all.
Our EU Policy Principles: User Controls
As the EU is gearing up for a major reform of key Internet regulation, we are introducing the principles that will guide our policy work surrounding the Digital Services Act (DSA). We believe the DSA is a key opportunity to change the Internet for the better; to question the paradigm of capturing users’ attention that shapes our online environments so fundamentally, and to restore users’ autonomy and control. In this post, we introduce policy principles that aim to strengthen users' informational self-determination and thereby promote healthier online communities that allow for deliberative discourse.
In a few months, the European Commission will introduce its much anticipated proposal for the Digital Services Act, the most significant reform of European platform regulation in two decades. The Act, which will modernize the backbone of the EU’s Internet legislation—the e-Commerce Directive—will set out new responsibilities and rules for online platforms.
EFF supports the Commission’s goal of promoting an inclusive, fair and accessible digital society. We believe that giving users more transparency and autonomy to understand and shape the forces that determine their online experiences is key to achieving this goal.
Even Microsoft - uses Linux as the operating system for its cloud. We are facing a digital enclosure movement similar to what was enacted over the commons during the industrial revolution - we need to secure a vibrant - level-enough playing field for all manner of to digital technology infrastructures to serve us - rather that privateered infrastructures designed as choice architecture to addict us to private profiteering.
What If Technology Belonged to the People?
We need non-market, publicly-owned alternatives to big tech. Here’s how we get it.
Since the pandemic began, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft have seen their values increase by well over $1.7 trillion. Is it because these companies are offering technologies we all need or is it because they enjoy a series of monopolies that ensure greater wealth and control during a period of great uncertainty?
With so many people stuck at home, these internet-first companies were of course well-positioned to provide critical services during a pandemic. But they all got there by leveraging the labor of some of the most vulnerable populations in the world, extracting and selling the data of their customers, getting massive tax breaks, and otherwise taking advantage of huge weaknesses in our economic and political systems. With the economy and society falling apart, these massive companies—already monopolies during “normal” times—are becoming monolithic.
What, then, is to be done about these companies and their technologies which, on the one hand, facilitate unprecedented communication and address once intractable logistics challenges, but, on the other hand, contribute to widespread suffering everyday? Can we subordinate these technologies, whether they be algorithms or their data sets, to the ends of making a more fair social order? Put simply: Can we create technology that is owned by the people who use it, and whose main purpose is to help humanity rather than extract wealth for a small class of individuals?
Another small signal in the emerging transformation of our political-economic paradigm
Modern monetary theory is not the future — it's already here: Don Pittis
Despite mainstream scoffing, credible economists say COVID-19 means MMT is no longer just theory
When modern monetary theory began to emerge into popular consciousness almost two years ago it carried with it an odour of coming from the distant economic fringe.
Opposed by many traditional economists from both the left and the right, MMT as it became popularly known, was the idea that governments didn't have to raise new taxes to increase spending.
Instead, like the funding for the Second World War, governments that controlled their own currencies, claimed the theory, could borrow from their own central banks and keep on spending, creating economic growth and jobs until inflation finally kicked in.
Only a year and a half after I first wrote about MMT as a radical idea that effectively offered a bottomless piggy bank for new government spending, it appears that the fringe is going mainstream. And as COVID-19 pulls the rug out from under economic growth, some economists are beginning to face up to the fact that a version of MMT has moved from economic conjecture to economic fact.
This is an exciting signal for both people concerned with growing environmental plastic and for the concept of a metabolic - circle economy.
A new kind of plastic that is able to maintain its original qualities when recycled
A team of researchers from the U.S., China, and Saudi Arabia has developed a new kind of plastic that is able to maintain its original qualities when recycled. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how the new plastic is made and how well it did when tested for recyclability.
For many years, plastics have been seen as a highly desirable modern advancement—they are light, strong, bendable when needed, and can be used in a very wide variety of applications. The down side to plastics, of course, is that they do not recycle very well and they take a very long time to decay. This has led to millions of tons of plastic waste winding up in landfills and in the water table. Because of that, scientists have been hard a work looking for a new kind of plastic that has all the advantages of the old plastic but also can be easily recycled. In this new effort, the researchers claim to have developed just such a plastic.
The team then used the monomers from both processes to make new batches of PBTL, proving that the new plastic could be created, broken down and created again—over and over. The researchers suggest that the process could be repeated indefinitely. They further suggest that their new plastic could be used to make a host of products now made using conventional plastics—greatly reducing the amount of plastics that end up in the environment. The only caveat in the scenario is that such plastics would have to be separated from other materials before they could be recycled.
This is an important signal of how the emerging wave of Elder Boomers - who reconfigured the paradigm of giving birth - will likely support the development of new forms of midwifing new ways to journey the last stages of our own lives.
This suit is not only chic, it is made out of organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores. Not only that, the company claims the mushrooms can decompose our post mortem bodies while cleaning toxins from our bodies before they leach out into the soil.
Mushroom Burial Suit Creates Life After Death
Dying can be hard on the environment. If you're buried, you're going to be pumped full of a few gallons of toxic embalming fluid, which will soon leach out of your corpse and then out of your casket, which will most likely be stored for posterity in a cemetery that uses tons of pesticides and astronomical amounts of water to keep it looking nice. If you're cremated, your body will be incinerated in an oven for between three and four hours at temperatures of around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (982 degrees Celsius). It takes about 28 gallons of fuel to incinerate a single human body, and the process releases carbon monoxide, soot and even mercury from dental fillings into the air.
Surely a person's dying wish not to leave one last giant boot print on this planet can be achieved.
The green burial industry is booming these days, and there are certainly a lot of people who claim to have a process or product to help dying people pass out of this world with as little environmental impact as possible. But the Coeio Infinity Burial Suit might be one of the most remarkable.
The complexity that is evolving life - teaches us that there can be No Solution to any problem - there can only be Solutioning - to current-evolving-eternally-emergent problems - for us. In this light this seems like better solutioning than the current reliance on chemical pesticides.
The mosquito strategy that could eradicate dengue
Infecting the insects with a bacteria that stops disease spread produces ‘staggering’ reduction in cases of the infection.
Epidemiologists typically speak in qualified and caveated language. But newly released results from a trial of a biological technology that aims to stop the spread of mosquito-borne diseases have them using terms such as “staggering” and “epochal”. The study, conducted in an Indonesia city, showed that releasing mosquitoes modified to carry a bacterium called Wolbachia, which stops the insects from transmitting some viruses, led to a steep drop in cases of dengue fever. The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that the technique, in development since the 1990s, could rid the world of some of these deadly diseases, researchers say.
The trial in Yogyakarta released Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes into randomly designated portions of the metropolis. Rates of dengue in these places were 77% lower, over several years, compared with areas that did not receive the mosquitoes. The results were reported in press releases on 26 August, but the full data underlying the figures are yet to be published.
It will be important to scrutinize the full data, but “a 77% reduction is really extraordinary”, says Philipp McCall, a vector biologist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, UK. “This does have huge promise.”
The team first began releasing the mosquitoes in parts of northeastern Australia that experienced periodic outbreaks of dengue — a disease that infects nearly 400 million people annually and kills 25,000, mostly in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, the Pacific and Latin America.
Another exciting signal - a vaccine instead of antibiotic for certain bacteria.
Vaccine that harnesses antifungal immunity protects mice from staph infection
Immunization of mice with a new vaccine consisting of fungal particles loaded with Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) proteins protects mice against S. aureus infection, according to a study published August 20 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by David Underhill of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, and colleagues.
The researchers developed a new vaccine called 4X-SA-GP, which consists of fungal β-glucan particles loaded with four S. aureus proteins. Mice were vaccinated once a week for three weeks with 4X-SA-GP, and then injected with S. aureus either four or eight weeks later. Vaccination induced protective T cell and antibody responses, and the T cell responses in particular were essential for vaccine-induced protection from S. aureus infection. Moreover, the mice had detectable antibody levels and reduced S. aureus levels in the spleen and kidneys eight weeks after immunization. According to the authors, this work potentially broadens the use of the β-glucan particle vaccine system for a much-needed vaccine targeting S. aureus.
This is an interesting signal - weakish but potentially very significant.
Meet antivitamins. They may replace your antibiotics one day
German researchers have just solved the mystery of how these substances work.
As pathogens' resistance grows, scientists are searching for a class of drugs that could replace antibiotics.
Antivitamins that switch off vitamins in bacteria are being investigated.
Scientists have been struggling to understand how naturally occurring antivitamins do what they do.
One particularly significant finding of the new research is that, although the B1 antivitamin prevents B1 from functioning in bacteria, it doesn't interfere with the vitamin for humans. This offers hope that antivitamins can be developed that target and neutralize pathogens without doing harm to patients.
This is a strong signal of a new complementary bio-economy paradigm - every mall, every big-box grocery - should have this sort of farm on their roofs
World's biggest rooftop greenhouse opens in Montreal
Building on a new hanging garden trend, a greenhouse atop a Montreal warehouse growing eggplants and tomatoes to meet demand for locally sourced foods has set a record as the largest in the world.
It's not an obvious choice of location to cultivate organic vegetables—in the heart of Canada's second-largest city—but Lufa Farms on Wednesday inaugurates the facility that spans 160,000 square feet (15,000 square meters), or about the size of three football fields.
"The company's mission is to grow food where people live and in a sustainable way," spokesman Thibault Sorret told AFP, as he showed off its first harvest of giant eggplants.
It is the fourth rooftop greenhouse the company has erected in the city. The first, built in 2011 at a cost of more than Can$2 million (US$1.5 million), broke new ground.
Another wonder-full signal of our capacity to see the very small - the implications include understanding and creating new forms of matter and progressing the domestication of DNA.
“True ‘atomic resolution’ is a real milestone,” adds John Rubinstein, a structural biologist at the University of Toronto in Canada. Getting atomic-resolution structures of many proteins will still be a daunting task because of other challenges, such as a protein’s flexibility. “These preprints show where one can get to if those other limitations can be addressed,” he adds.
‘It opens up a whole new universe’: Revolutionary microscopy technique sees individual atoms for first time
Cryo-electron microscopy breaks a key barrier that will allow the workings of proteins to be probed in unprecedented detail.
A game-changing technique for imaging molecules known as cryo-electron microscopy has produced its sharpest pictures yet — and, for the first time, discerned individual atoms in a protein.
By achieving atomic resolution using cryogenic-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), researchers will be able to understand, in unprecedented detail, the workings of proteins that cannot easily be examined by other imaging techniques, such as X-ray crystallography.
The breakthrough, reported by two laboratories late last month, cements cryo-EM’s position as the dominant tool for mapping the 3D shapes of proteins, say scientists. Ultimately, these structures will help researchers to understand how proteins work in health and disease, and lead to better drugs with fewer side effects.
“It’s really a milestone, that’s for sure. There’s really nothing to break anymore. This was the last resolution barrier,” says Holger Stark, a biochemist and electron microscopist at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, who led one of the studies1. The other2 was led by Sjors Scheres and Radu Aricescu, structural biologists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB) in Cambridge, UK. Both were posted on the bioRxiv preprint server on 22 May.
And making it ever easier to capture images.
"Our lens has an arbitrary field of view, which ideally can reach 180° without image distortion," Rezende Martins said. "We've tested its effectiveness for an angle of 110°. With wider angles of view, light energy decreases owing to the shadow effect, but this can be corrected by post-processing."
Researchers develop flat lens a thousand times thinner than a human hair
A lens that is a thousand times thinner than a human hair has been developed in Brazil by researchers at the University of São Paulo's São Carlos School of Engineering (EESC-USP). It can serve as a camera lens in smartphones or be used in other devices that depend on sensors.
The paper is entitled "On Metalenses with Arbitrarily Wide Field of View" and is published in ACS Photonics. The study was supported by FAPESP via a scholarship for a research internship abroad awarded to Augusto Martins, Ph.D. candidate and lead author of the paper.
The lens consists of a single nanometric layer of silicon on arrays of nanoposts that interact with light. The structure is printed by photolithography, a well-known technique used to fabricate transistors.
I’ve avoided sharing much about Covid-19 - there is just too much we don’t know - too much uncertainty and too much that remains reliant on strong social fabric that enables good physical distancing and masking. But this is a good signal of possibles. I use the term physical distancing - because that is possible only if we have strong social fabric - to protect others - who aim to protect us.
Four scenarios on how we might develop immunity to Covid-19
As the world wearies of trying to suppress the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many of us are wondering what the future will look like as we try to learn to live with it.
Will it always have the capacity to make us so sick? Will our immune systems learn — and remember — how to cope with the new threat? Will vaccines be protective and long-lasting?
These pressing questions gained even greater urgency Monday with the news that scientists in Hong Kong have confirmed a 33-year-old man was reinfected with Covid-19; his second infection as diagnosed — by airport screening — came 4.5 months after his first infection in March.
STAT asked a number of experts to map out scenarios of how we might come to coexist with this new threat. In a time of uncertainty, the scenarios they sketched were actually hopeful, even if the relief most envisage is not immediately around the corner.
“I don’t think we’ll be wearing masks in two to three years — for this virus,” said Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
Menachery laid out four possible scenarios for how humans might interact with SARS-2 over time — in other words, what kind of immunity we might expect.
Some of the terms are of his own creation, so they may not be instantly recognizable to people who have studied immunology. They also cover a spectrum, and the lines between some of the scenarios can be blurry in spots. But they provide a useful discussion starter.
This may prove useful for some - and it also signals new standards and tools for constructing our home, play and works spaces
How to use ventilation and air filtration to prevent the spread of coronavirus indoors
The vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs indoors, most of it from the inhalation of airborne particles that contain the coronavirus. The best way to prevent the virus from spreading in a home or business would be to simply keep infected people away. But this is hard to do when an estimated 40% of cases are asymptomatic and asymptomatic people can still spread the coronavirus to others.
Masks do a decent job at keeping the virus from spreading into the environment, but if an infected person is inside a building, inevitably some virus will escape into the air.
I am a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. Much of my work has focused on how to control the transmission of airborne infectious diseases indoors, and I’ve been asked by my own university, my kids’ schools and even the Alaska State Legislature for advice on how to make indoor spaces safe during this pandemic.
Once the virus escapes into the air inside a building, you have two options: bring in fresh air from outside or remove the virus from the air inside the building.
This is a weak signal - but one that suggests the boundary-less - entanglements of wholes-with-wholes-with-parts - all the way up and down - a sort of universal participatory panopticon-ing-panpsychism.
This is on the margins of understanding - in the same way that space curves around and through …..
Our results force physicists to deal with the measurement problem head on: either our experiment doesn't scale up, and quantum mechanics gives way to a so-called "objective collapse theory," or one of our three common-sense assumptions must be rejected.
A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question
We have found a new paradox in quantum mechanics—one of our two most fundamental scientific theories, together with Einstein's theory of relativity—that throws doubt on some common-sense ideas about physical reality.
Quantum mechanics vs common sense
Take a look at these three statements:
- When someone observes an event happening, it really happened.
- It is possible to make free choices, or at least, statistically random choices.
- A choice made in one place can't instantly affect a distant event. (Physicists call this "locality.")
These are all intuitive ideas, and widely believed even by physicists. But our research, published in Nature Physics, shows they cannot all be true—or quantum mechanics itself must break down at some level.
Although a conclusive test may be decades away, if the quantum mechanical predictions continue to hold, this has strong implications for our understanding of reality—even more so than the Bell correlations. For one, the correlations we discovered cannot be explained just by saying that physical properties don't exist until they are measured.
Now the absolute reality of measurement outcomes themselves is called into question.
