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:
How Neutral Theory Altered Ideas About Biodiversity
Elementary particles part ways with their properties
How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will
Articles:
Unfiltered: How YouTube’s Content ID Discourages Fair Use and Dictates What We See Online
Making predictions about 2021 seems downright foolhardy. We did it anyway.
Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will
What Explains the Decline of Serial Killers?
Drones and AI detect soybean maturity with high accuracy
Innovative universal flu vaccine shows promise in first clinical test
Vertical Farm in Copenhagen reimagines sustainable food
Researchers develop unique process for producing light-matter mixture
The lightest light – the future of digital displays and brain science
This flexible and rechargeable battery is 10 times more powerful than state of the art
Plant-based and recyclable plastic bottles using citrus peel as raw material
#micropoem
In 1968, the renowned geneticist Motoo Kimura proposed an alternative explanation, now called neutral theory. Kimura posited that most of the variation between organisms is neither advantageous nor disadvantageous. Consequently, most of the variety we see isn’t a product of the hidden hand of selection but rather of luck. “All you need is some input of variation, and random forces will do the rest,” said Armand Leroi, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College London.
Kimura’s neutral theory of molecular evolution sparked debate because it seemed to water down the influence of selection. But the genomics revolution of the late 20th century and widespread DNA sequencing confirmed that Kimura was right; swapping out one letter for another in a gene’s code usually has little effect.
Ever since, neutral theory has been the default assumption (or null hypothesis) in genetics. “If you want to show that a given variant in a DNA sequence is under selection, you first have to really show that it can’t be just explained by neutrality,” Leroi said.
Whether we like to admit it or not, random forces are always subtly influencing the world. Neutral theory provides a framework for making these forces known and measurable. Leroi believes it should continue to expand its influence “until it becomes an integral part of explaining diversity wherever we see it in the world, be it in the supermarket or a tropical rainforest.”
How Neutral Theory Altered Ideas About Biodiversity
Temperamental properties
Aharonov and Rohrlich liken the behavior of the particle and its modular angular momentum to the grinning Cheshire cat in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," which appears to move on, leaving its grin behind. "Although it's very surprising that properties can leave their particles, it is not as surprising as to say that nothing happened and there was an effect," says Aharonov, comparing their explanation with the idea of the particle with its properties encountering nothing that can change the modular angular momentum, yet that property changing anyway.
Like all new concepts, Aharonov and Rohrlich's explanation is not without its criticisms, either. Rohrlich highlights the point raised by one of the (anonymous) peer reviewers of the paper, who nonetheless gave an overall positive appraisal of the paper. "They were saying, humorously, yes we avoided one problem, but we got ourselves into another problem," says Rohrlich. Yet he adds, "If you're talking about a cat and its grin, that's very strange, but of course, all of this has to translate back to elementary particles, and if an elementary particle loses its spin because its spin goes somewhere else—maybe that's something we can get used to."
Elementary particles part ways with their properties
As Turing noted in 1936, in order to compute something, a Turing machine must eventually halt — it can’t get trapped in an infinite loop. But he also proved that there’s no reliable, repeatable method for distinguishing machines that halt from machines that simply run forever — a fact known as the halting problem.
The busy beaver game asks: Given a certain number of rules, what’s the maximum number of steps that a Turing machine can take before halting?
How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits
understanding that progress—the progress that we have had—is not really visible. It’s a very small delta. So, we may only curate 1% more progress every year than we destroyed. Net progress of 1% is really not visible in any given year. But 1% compounded over decades and even centuries is what civilization is.
You have to only understand that we can enlarge and increase our ability to solve problems.
Most of the problems we have today are from technology that we’ve invented in the past. But I’m also a techno-centric person. I believe that the solutions to the problems created by technology is not less technology, but better technology. I equate technology to a type of thinking. And if you have a stupid idea, or a hurtful idea, the solution is not to stop thinking. The decision is to have better thinking, better ideas.
the Technium still won’t be front of mind. I really like Danny Hillis’ definition of technology, which is “anything that doesn’t quite work yet.” In other words, all the new stuff. It will just always be the new stuff. And as it becomes old and now works really well, it will disappear from our awareness.
there aren’t standalone technologies. Technologies are always coming out of networks that require other related ideas to have the next one. The fact that we have simultaneous independent invention as a norm works against the idea of the heroic inventor, that we’re dependent on them for inventions. These things will come when all the other pieces are ready.
What I’ve learned about thinking about the future is that you have to think of in terms of scenarios, you have to try to not predict. But in a sense, you have to not be surprised either.
Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will
Describing narrative as a technology will seem like a stretch depending on how you define technology, which, as I’ve argued on a number of occasions, is a rather more complicated task than one might imagine before undertaking it. For what it’s worth, though, I am not alone in conceiving of narrative as a kind of technology.
“The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles argued several years ago, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential technology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.”
… you can know what you are to do only if you also know what story or stories you are a part of.
Stories of this sort also act as a filter on reality. We never merely perceive the world, we interpret it. In fact, our perception is already interpretation. And the work of interpretation depends to no small degree on the stories that we have internalized about the world. So when we hear about this, that, or the other thing happening, we tend to fit the event into our paradigmatic stories.
To summarize, then: stories shape our identity, grant to us a sense of direction, and play an important role in our interpretation of the world.
Narrative Collapse
There seems to be an increase in the signalling that our economies have to review the concept of monopoly - if we are going to have a digital environment accountable to and supportive of democratic governance. This is one of the important topics that we have to re-imagine - not just the platform monopolies - but the growing power of copyright monopolies - we must make Intellectual Property serve society - rather than the wealthy.
Unfiltered: How YouTube’s Content ID Discourages Fair Use and Dictates What We See Online
The Internet promised to lower barriers to expression. Anyone with access to a computer and an Internet connection could share their creativity with the world. And it worked— spurring, among other things, the emergence of a new type and generation of art and criticism: the online creator—independent from major labels, movie studios, or TV networks.
However, that promise is fading once again, because while these independent creators need not rely on Hollywood, they are bound to another oligopoly—the few Internet platforms that can help them reach a broad audience. And in the case of those who make videos, they are largely dependent on just one platform: YouTube.
That dependence has real consequences for online creativity. Because YouTube is the dominant player in the online video market, its choices dictate the norms of the whole industry. And unfortunately for independent creators, YouTube has proven to be more interested in appeasing large copyright holders than protecting free speech or promoting creativity. Through its automatic copyright filter, Content ID, YouTube has effectively replaced legal fair use of copyrighted material with its own rules.
These rules disproportionately affect audio, making virtually any use of music risky. Classical musicians worry about playing public domain music. Music criticism that includes the parts of songs being analyzed is rare. The rules only care about how much is being used, so reviewers and educators do not use the “best” examples of what they are discussing, they use the shortest ones, sacrificing clarity. The filter changes constantly, so videos that passed muster once (and always were fair use) constantly need to be re-edited. Money is taken away from independent artists who happen to use parts of copyrighted material, and deposited into the pockets of major media companies, despite the fact that they would never be able to claim that money in court.
We are at the beginning of the ‘what’s next’ season - as a imagined ‘new year’ approaches - here is a signal of the …. And of course what’s will the digital environment enable?
Making predictions about 2021 seems downright foolhardy. We did it anyway.
BE HONEST, you’ve wanted to dump 2020 like a flaming pile of your quarantine puppy’s excrement since April. As we slog through this infernal period in various states of pandemic lockdown—a restive baseline augmented by the stress of social inequities, economic uncertainty, an unprecedented fire season, a shortage of hurricane names, remote schooling that chomps every last megabit of internet in the house, and our TV streaming backlogs dwindling to ration levels—we can’t be blamed for hoping that the stroke of midnight on December 31 somehow magically makes things right.
But we don’t know whether 2021 will be better than the year we’ve just endured. In fact, Reader of the Near Future, you already know things we don’t about 2021. Those things are not on this list. For us—and for this story—it’s November 1, 2020. Even so, we know that next year will be different. The pandemic is accelerating changes in our lives. In some cases, we’ve found we actually like things better the new way. In other cases, well—like our COVID-cushioned waistlines—things just ain’t ever going back to the way they were before. So we set out to investigate what 2021 has in store, and we focused on what each of us always cares about most: our own navels. We asked (from the home workspaces we’re so fortunate to have, in unwashed sweatpants, while mostly domesticated animals or somewhat feral children climbed across our keyboards) faculty and alumni soothsayers how our work, our homes and our play will be different in 2021.
We’ll be right about some of these. We’ll be wrong about others. After all, if there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that none of us can really predict what will happen next.
We are so disciplined into a sort of physics - billiard-ball understanding of causality - but entanglemeants enable effects-to-change-causes.
Kevin Kelly on Why Technology Has a Will
We live in a timeline that oscillates somewhere between strangeness and doom. Much of the blame gets placed on new technologies and society’s digestion of them. And though many of the growing pains we’re experiencing amount to history rhyming, our newfound access to enormous amounts of information has produced anomalies. Notably, we can create and live in elaborate simulative bubbles. Whether via politics (QAnon) or nostalgic cultural recreations (‘80s Downtown Art Scene), many choose to roleplay a world or previous historical era while increasingly intangible forms of technology become more powerful. It’s world-building that’s become almost a new social contract: let others do what they want politically and economically, so long as we can continue to roleplay without too much interference.
Technologist Kevin Kelly has pinned this simulative aspect on technology’s function as a kind of nascent biological entity with its own agency. The “Technium” as he refers to it, is “the sphere of visible technology and intangible organizations that form what we think of as modern culture.” While some would interpret technology to be a driverless, chaotic system made all the more destructive by its attachment to a market economy, Kelly argues that it’s part of a system acting on its own vague accord, interacting with humans as a way to further itself.
A weakish signal, but perhaps potentially important of a positive impact of transparency?
What Explains the Decline of Serial Killers?
Since a dramatic peak in the 1980s, serial killers in the U.S. have been in decline for three decades. Experts have a few theories that can help explain why.
From the 1970s through the ’90s, stories of serial killers like Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer — both of whom pleaded guilty to killing dozens of women — dominated headlines. Today, however, we see far fewer twisted tales in the vein of the Zodiac Killer or John Wayne Gacy.
After that three-decade surge, a rapid decline followed. Nearly 770 serial killers operated in the U.S. throughout the 1980s, and just under 670 in the ’90s, based on data compiled by Mike Aamodt of Radford University. The sudden plummet came with the new century, when the rate fell below 400 in the aughts and, as of late 2016, just over 100 during the past decade. The rough estimate on the global rate appeared to show a similar drop over the same period. In a stunning collapse, these criminals that terrorized and captivated a generation quickly dwindled. Put another way, 189 people in the U.S. died by the hands of a serial killer in 1987, compared to 30 in 2015. Various theories attempt to explain this change.
In reality it’s not clear whether there truly was a surge of serial killing, or at least not one as pronounced as the data suggest. Advances in police investigation (for example, the ability to link murders more effectively) and improved data collection could help explain the uptick. That said, no one doubts that serial killing rose for several decades, and that rise fits with a general increase in crime. Similarly, everyone agrees on a subsequent fall in serial killing, and that, too, fits with a general decrease in crime. But where did they go?
This is just one signal of fundamental re-imagination-ing that is progressing our understanding of - life the universe and everything. Particle-wave-energy - differences-that-make-a-difference?
Fragments of energy – not waves or particles – may be the fundamental building blocks of the universe
Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics, my colleague Jeffrey Eischen and I have described an updated way to think about matter. We propose that matter is not made of particles or waves, as was long thought, but – more fundamentally – that matter is made of fragments of energy.
This is a good signal of the future of agricultural technologies - AI, robotics, domesticated DNA and microbial helpers.
Drones and AI detect soybean maturity with high accuracy
Walking rows of soybeans in the mid-summer heat is an exhausting but essential chore in breeding new cultivars. Researchers brave the heat daily during crucial parts of the growing season to look for plants showing desirable traits, such as early pod maturity. But without a way to automate detection of these traits, breeders can't test as many plots as they'd like in a given year, elongating the time it takes to bring new cultivars to market.
In a new study from the University of Illinois, researchers predict soybean maturity date within two days using drone images and artificial intelligence, greatly reducing the need for boots on the ground.
"Assessing pod maturity is very time consuming and prone to errors. It's a scoring system based on the color of the pod, so it is also subject to human bias," says Nicolas Martin, assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences at Illinois and co-author on the study. "Many research groups are trying to use drone pictures to assess maturity, but can't do it at scale. So we came up with a more precise way to do that. It was really cool, actually."
A small signal - toward transforming human entanglement with microbial environments.
Innovative universal flu vaccine shows promise in first clinical test
For epidemiologists, the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly intensified their long-standing nightmare about another virus: the emergence of a new and deadly strain of flu. A universal flu vaccine, effective against any strain of the influenza virus that can infect humans, could protect us from this peril, but progress has been slow. A novel concept for one universal vaccine candidate has now passed its first test in a small clinical trial, its developers report today in Nature Medicine.
And another signal - of the progress toward urban and vertical farming. This approach may not only be more ‘green’ contributing to meeting the challenges of climate change - but also provide better food security.
When the first harvest is made in early 2021 the vertical farm will have a capacity of about 200-tonnes of produce a year; that’ll soon quadruple as the system beds in.
Vertical Farm in Copenhagen reimagines sustainable food
We’re looking up to tech specialist YesHealth Group and Nordic Harvest for their clever take on the future of food production
The vertical farm has been the holy grail for optimistic urbanists for decades, a way of cramming food-growing capacity into a compact space that’s perfect for serving up supplies to local residents. Self-contained and highly sustainable, promising practically zero food miles and no obvious downsides, why haven’t more high-rise homesteads haven’t been sowed within city limits around the world? The answer is complexity; an array of racks and lights needs to be constantly monitored and fettled to maximise efficiency and economy.
This new Vertical Farm project in Copenhagen is a collaboration between Taiwanese tech specialist YesHealth Group and Nordic Harvest, a Danish start-up dedicated to Vertical Agriculture in all its forms. While it’s unsurprising that this kind of thinking has taken root in space-pressed communities like Taiwan, the Danish company’s approach is rooted in a desire to return over-farmed land to a more natural state. The company points out that in the centuries following the Industrial Revolution Denmark’s forest cover was reduced to just 2 per cent of its land area – prior to this the entire country was densely forested. Even today, with its ultra-efficient forest management, the figure is still just 14 per cent.
An amazing weak signal of the future of created matter - a sort of domestication of light and matter.
Researchers develop unique process for producing light-matter mixture
In groundbreaking new research, an international team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities has developed a unique process for producing a quantum state that is part light and part matter.
The discovery provides fundamental new insights for more efficiently developing the next generation of quantum-based optical and electronic devices. The research could also have an impact on increasing efficiency of nanoscale chemical reactions.
The research is published in Nature Photonics.
the interactions can be strong enough that the quantum-mechanical nature of the light and the vibrations comes into play. Under such conditions, the absorbed energy is transferred back and forth between the light (photons) in the nanocavities and the atomic vibrations (phonons) in the material at a rate fast enough such that the light photon and matter phonon can no longer be distinguished. Under such conditions, these strongly coupled modes result in new quantum-mechanical objects that are part light and part vibration at the same time, known as polaritons.
Speaking of light - this may come to our screens in the next decade.
The lightest light – the future of digital displays and brain science
A team of scientists from the University of St Andrews has developed a new way of making the most durable, lightweight and thinnest light source available so far, which could revolutionize the future of mobile technologies and pave the way for new advances in brain science.
Writing in two separate papers and published in Nature Communications today (Monday 7 December), the new research into the development of organic LEDs, led by the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, has implications not only for the future designs of mobile phones and tablets but could also play a key role in neuroscience research and clinical technologies used to help patients who suffer from neurological diseases.
Using a combination of organic electroluminescent molecules, metal oxide and biocompatible polymer protection layers, the scientists created organic LEDs that are as thin and flexible as the everyday cling film we use at home. The new light sources developed will have future implications for digital displays and can be used to make lighter and thinner displays for phones and tablets; displays that are big when we look at them, but that can be folded or rolled up when not in use.
Renewable energy and energy storage are key challenges for today and tomorrow’s devices and the evolving digital environment. This is a good signal of increased performance from our mobile devices and screens.
The areal capacity for this innovative battery is 50 milliamps per square centimeter at room temperature—this is 10-20 times greater than the areal capacity of a typical Lithium ion battery. So for the same surface area, the battery described in Joule can provide 5 to 10 times more power.
This flexible and rechargeable battery is 10 times more powerful than state of the art
A team of researchers has developed a flexible, rechargeable silver oxide-zinc battery with a five to 10 times greater areal energy density than state of the art. The battery also is easier to manufacture; while most flexible batteries need to be manufactured in sterile conditions, under vacuum, this one can be screen printed in normal lab conditions. The device can be used in flexible, stretchable electronics for wearables as well as soft robotics.
The team, made up of researchers at the University of California San Diego and California-based company ZPower, details their findings in the Dec. 7 issue of the journal Joule.
"Our batteries can be designed around electronics, instead of electronics needed to be designed around batteries," said Lu Yin, one of the paper's co-first authors and a Ph.D. student in the research group of UC San Diego's nanoengineering Professor Joseph Wang.
A good signal of the metabolic economy - rather than ban plastic - make plastic that can be reused and/or composted.
Plant-based and recyclable plastic bottles using citrus peel as raw material
The shift from fossil-based to renewable bio-plastics requires new efficient methods. New technology developed at VTT enables the use of pectin-containing agricultural waste, such as citrus peel and sugar beet pulp, as raw material for bio-based PEF-plastics for replacing fossil-based PET. The carbon footprint of plastic bottles can be lowered by 50% when replacing their raw material of PET with PEF polymers, which also provides a better shelf life for food.
"In the near future, you may buy orange juice in bottles that are made out of orange peel. VTT's novel technology provides a circular approach to using food waste streams for high-performance food packaging material, and at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions," says Professor of Practice Holger Pöhler from VTT.
the barrier properties of PEF plastics are better than PETs, meaning that the food products have a longer shelf life. PEF is a fully recyclable and renewable high-performance plastic. Therefore, it opens up possibilities for the industries to reduce waste and to have positive impact on the environment.
#micropoem
mhm -
cause and effect -
has no memory -
doesn’t need it or enable it -
but we know memory exists -
how does it arise? - -
i re-member -
my-self -
ow! -
that changes causality -
be-cause -
effect would change -
cause -
Memory is -
literally a time machine -
we need it to survive in -
the mo-meant -
because -
anticipation -
enables -
enaction-with---
mhm -
having a hard time -
keeping up -
hubris -
of dunning-kruger -
self-ass-es-meants -
of how soon -
i’ll get my tabs down to 10
