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:
Fiscal austerity and the rise of the Nazis
What pro wrestling can teach us about the quest for truth
Articles:
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
europe's largest 3D-printer prints an entire two-story house
Chicago anaerobic digester, urban farm project secures final funding for $32M campus
NASA researchers track slowly splitting 'dent' in Earth's magnetic field
Bacteria that "eat" only air found in cold deserts around the world
Oldest enzyme in cellular respiration isolated
Researchers find method to regrow cartilage in the joints
Genetically modified mosquitoes have been OK’d for a first U.S. test flight
Exxon Ends 92-Year Run on Dow Jones
Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.
State of the Species
The Ayn Randian hero is delusional: his (always his) achievements are a combination of freeriding on the people whose contributions he’s erased, and bleating that everyone who had the same idea as him was actually stealing his idea, rather than simply living in the same influences he had. This isn’t intrinsically racist or sexist or class-discriminatory, but when you’re ripping off and denigrating other people, it’s a lot easier to get away with it if you’re a rich, white dude.
The problem is that property frameworks – especially when applied to ideas – demand an unrealistic simplicity of title. Edgar Allan Poe invented the mystery story (at the same time as several other people were inventing the mystery story) but his invention has been improved in a myriad of ways by practitioners who had brilliant ideas (that other people in their cohort were also having). Organizing authorship around markets requires us to either given Edgar Allan Poe’s estate a royalty every time we write a mystery, or denigrate the value of Poe’s contribution to zero.
But we can have a complex, non-property way of looking at things. I wrote my books. They were hard work. I made real imaginative leaps that contributed to the field.
Also: I wrote them because I read the works of my peers and my forebears. If I hadn’t written them, someone else would have written something comparable.
All these things can be true. All these things are true. Originality exists, it just doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
The descendants of settler colonialists have done beautiful and kind things (amid ugly and brutal ones), and reconciliation with the indigenous peoples of the world does not require us to repudiate those achievements, only to acknowledge their context, the injustices that they were rooted in, and work to right those wrongs.
Cory Doctorow: Terra Nullius
The demise of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazi fascism reveals that too much harsh austerity can trigger social unrest and unintended political consequences. Even after correcting for alternative explanations, including the economic downturn, it is clear austerity played a critical role. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that austerity led to substantial human suffering and exacerbated inequality and inequity. At a time when people needed the most from their government, the government failed them, and they were lured by the siren calls of radical populist parties.
Fiscal austerity and the rise of the Nazis
It looks like escaping the [Plato’s] cave should be easy for the pro wrestling fan: listen to the right podcast, or find the right social media account, and you can uncover the truth. But it’s not quite that simple. What do you do when you get conflicting versions of the same event? How can you be sure that the social media account you find is the real person and not, in some way, a further presentation of the character? How can you tell if you’re being further manipulated by the storytellers? The short answer is: you can’t. For anything that purports to depict reality, you can always wonder if it’s part of the show, another layer or part of a narrative with a purpose other than guiding you to truth.
In philosophy too, much the same holds. When we perceive something, we can always ask if that thing is really there, and sceptical scenarios from Plato through René Descartes to The Matrix (1999) give ample grounds for doubt. Could I be dreaming? Could I be a character within an elaborate game created by superintelligent beings? We have reason to doubt if there are conclusive arguments for any claim that can’t be met with equally powerful counterarguments.
There’s nothing stopping us from demanding an answer but, invariably, an answer is hard – if not impossible – to give. Given that appearances are all we have direct access to, this is a powerful argument for an inescapable, and somewhat tragic, scepticism: we have the urge to pursue reality but are eternally thwarted in this effort, as we can never be sure of recognising reality even if we meet it.
Fans want to be given the appearance, the show, and then enjoy speculating about what’s really going on. If the reality were simply laid out for all to see all the time, it wouldn’t be interesting – you want the flicker of mismatch between appearance and reality, as that is what stimulates us to investigate
What pro wrestling can teach us about the quest for truth
This is an important signal - the possibility of a transformation of economic paradigm and perhaps of capitalism itself.
capitalism is now in a new, strange phase: Socialism for the very, very few (courtesy of central banks and governments catering to a tiny oligarchy) and stringent austerity, coupled with cruel competition in an environment of industrial, and technologically advanced, feudalism for almost everyone else.
Something remarkable just happened this August: How the pandemic has sped up the passage to postcapitalism – Lannan Foundation virtual talk
Two days ago, something extraordinary happened. Something that has never happened before in the history of capitalism. In Britain, the news came out that the economy had suffered its greatest slump ever – more than 22% down during the first 7 months of 2020. Remarkably, on the same day, the London Stock Exchange, the FTSE100 index, rose by more than 2%. On the same day, during a time America has ground to a halt and is beginning to look like not just as an economy in deep trouble but also, ominously, as a failed state, Wall Street’s SP500 index hit an all-time record.
Before 2008, the money markets also behaved in a manner that defied humanism. News of mass firings of workers would be routinely followed by sharp rises in the share price of the companies “letting their workers go” – as if they were concerned with their liberation… But at least, there was a capitalist logic to that correlation between firings and share prices. That disagreeable causality was anchored in expectations regarding a company’s actual profits. More precisely, the prediction that a reduction in the company’s wage bill might, to the extent that the loss of personnel lead to lower proportional reductions in output, lead to a rise in profits and, thus, dividends. The mere belief that there were enough speculators out there thinking that there were enough speculators out there who might form that particular expectation was enough to occasion a boost in the share price of companies firing workers.
That was then, prior to 2008. Today, this link between profit forecasts and share prices has disappeared and, as a consequence, the share market’s misanthropy has entered a new, post-capitalist phase. This is not as controversial a claim as it may sound at first. In the midst of our current pandemic not one person in their right mind imagines that there are speculators out there who believe that there are enough speculators out there who may believe that company profits in the UK or in the US will rise any time soon. And yet they buy shares with enthusiasm. The pandemic’s effect on our post-2008 world is now creating forces hitherto unfathomable.
If Covid-19 is creating conditions for a transformation of our economic paradigm and challenging all of us to re-imagine our institutions, social structures and distributions of opportunity - than this is another important signal for why we would all benefit from a truly level-enough playing field.
thanks to the work of Alessandro Pluchino at the University of Catania in Italy and a couple of colleagues. These guys have created a computer model of human talent and the way people use it to exploit opportunities in life. The model allows the team to study the role of chance in this process.
If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance.
The most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest, a new computer model of wealth creation confirms. Taking that into account can maximize return on many kinds of investment.
while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.
The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.
And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures.
What factors, then, determine how individuals become wealthy? Could it be that chance plays a bigger role than anybody expected? And how can these factors, whatever they are, be exploited to make the world a better and fairer place?
It’s likely that this is widely known by the time this Friday Thinking goes out - but I think this type of test - not only signals a fast test - but a transformation of how we manage our way through other possible pandemics and perhaps even more local infections - Denge, Malaria, etc.
“This is a huge step forward to make testing more accessible,” said Chantal Vogels, a Yale postdoctoral fellow, who led the laboratory development and validation along with Doug Brackney, an adjunct assistant clinical professor. “This started off as an idea in our lab soon after we found saliva to be a promising sample type of the detection of SARS-CoV-2, and now it has the potential to be used on a large scale to help protect public health. We are delighted to make this contribution to the fight against coronavirus.”
Quick and affordable saliva-based COVID-19 test developed by Yale scientists receives FDA Emergency Use Authorization
A saliva-based laboratory diagnostic test developed by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health to determine whether someone is infected with the novel coronavirus has been granted an emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The method, called SalivaDirect, is being further validated as a test for asymptomatic individuals through a program that tests players and staff from the National Basketball Association (NBA). SalivaDirect is simpler, less expensive, and less invasive than the traditional method for such testing, known as nasopharyngeal (NP) swabbing. Results so far have found that SalivaDirect is highly sensitive and yields similar outcomes as NP swabbing.
With the FDA’s emergency use authorization, the testing method is immediately available to other diagnostic laboratories that want to start using the new test, which can be scaled up quickly for use across the nation — and, perhaps, beyond — in the coming weeks, the researchers said. A key component of SalivaDirect, they note, is that the method has been validated with reagents and instruments from multiple vendors. This flexibility enables continued testing if some vendors encounter supply chain issues, as experienced early in the pandemic.
This is still an early signal of not just 3D printing as a construction method - but of a broader more profound transformation of how we make just about everything - a great book on this topic is by Neils Gershenfeld (Leader of MIT’s center of bits and atoms) - “Designing Reality”
There is a great 2 min video showing the process.
There is a great 2 min video showing the process.
europe's largest 3D-printer prints an entire two-story house
belgian company kamp C has 3D-printed — with europe’s biggest 3D-printer — an entire two-story house. featuring 90 square meters, the house was printed in one piece with a fixed printer, making it a world’s first.
sited on the grounds of kamp C in westerlo, belgium, the two-story house was printed as part of the european C3PO project with support from ERDF (european regional development fund). the idea behind the project is to use the achievement to encourage the construction industry to implement 3D concrete printing in their construction techniques.
the 3D-printed two-story house is three times stronger than a house built with quick building blocks. ‘the compressive strength of the material is three times higher than the classic rapid building block,’ explains marijke aerts, project manager at kamp C. this first house is a test building and it will be investigated whether the solidity will be maintained over time.
This is a great signal of the future of urban agriculture - helping to transform how we feed ourselves in ways that are effective and efficient for urban flourishing.
"We want to show folks in a tangible way that it's worth taking the extra step to separate food waste," Feldman said. "It will be recycled locally, which creates jobs, but then it also creates the great byproducts of renewable energy to strengthen infrastructure and nutrient-rich material we can use to grow more food... We're trying to connect some of those dots. The linear economy right now is pretty unsustainable."
Chicago anaerobic digester, urban farm project secures final funding for $32M campus
A Chicago community group in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood recently received the funding commitments needed to move ahead with a project to transform a nine-acre brownfield site into an urban farm. Construction on the $32 million project, which will include an on-site anaerobic digester (AD), begins next month and is expected to be complete by spring 2022.
The urban farm will grow an estimated 26,000 pounds of food per year for distribution in the community, which is considered a food desert. It is described as an example of working toward environmental justice in a low-income area that sustained a disproportionate impact from decades of disinvestment and industrial pollution. The site will also have an educational element to teach community members about growing their own food, healthy eating and organics recycling.
This is a fascinating signal in many ways - the emerging human-sensorium extending to truly global proportions - the implications for an exponentially expanding digital environment - the increasing resolution and complixifying of science as it fractalizes in dimensions of transdiciplines - growing the fields of affordances.
Despite this intro - it worth reading.
NASA researchers track slowly splitting 'dent' in Earth's magnetic field
A small but evolving dent in Earth's magnetic field can cause big headaches for satellites.
Earth's magnetic field acts like a protective shield around the planet, repelling and trapping charged particles from the Sun. But over South America and the southern Atlantic Ocean, an unusually weak spot in the field—called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or SAA—allows these particles to dip closer to the surface than normal. Particle radiation in this region can knock out onboard computers and interfere with the data collection of satellites that pass through it—a key reason why NASA scientists want to track and study the anomaly.
The South Atlantic Anomaly is also of interest to NASA's Earth scientists who monitor the changes in magnetic field strength there, both for how such changes affect Earth's atmosphere and as an indicator of what's happening to Earth's magnetic fields, deep inside the globe.
Currently, the SAA creates no visible impacts on daily life on the surface. However, recent observations and forecasts show that the region is expanding westward and continuing to weaken in intensity. It is also splitting—recent data shows the anomaly's valley, or region of minimum field strength, has split into two lobes, creating additional challenges for satellite missions.
This may be a very important signal of how life can exist with different processes - such that as we domesticate DNA - we could learn to harness the affordances of new processes for many other purposes.
the team has found that this ability may not be limited to Antarctica. The researchers found that the two genes previously linked to atmospheric chemosynthesis are abundant in soil in two other similar environments – the Arctic and the Tibetan Plateau.
Bacteria that "eat" only air found in cold deserts around the world
A few years ago researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) discovered bacteria in Antarctica that could survive on nothing but air. Now the team has found that this handy ability might not be limited to the South Pole, with evidence turning up in other cold desert locations. The finding could have implications for life beyond Earth, too.
Every living thing needs to get energy from somewhere. For animals that’s food, whether plants or meat or both. For plants, energy comes from sunlight. And for bacteria, it can be a mix of these things, or through “fixing” inorganic compounds in soil.
In 2017, the UNSW researchers discovered bacteria in Antarctica that gained their energy from a new source – the air itself. In low-nutrient soil, these bugs instead pull hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide out of the air around them, allowing them to thrive in environments where there’s very little other life. This phenomenon is known as atmospheric chemosynthesis.
This is another similar signal of how life can create ways to harnessing and metabolizing interesting food sources.
Oldest enzyme in cellular respiration isolated
In the first billion years, there was no oxygen on Earth. Life developed in an anoxic environment. Early bacteria probably obtained their energy by breaking down various substances by means of fermentation. However, there also seems to have been a kind of "oxygen-free respiration." This was suggested by studies on primordial microbes that are still found in anoxic habitats today.
"We already saw ten years ago that there are genes in these microbes that perhaps encode for a primordial respiration enzyme. Since then, we—as well as other groups worldwide—have attempted to prove the existence of this respiratory enzyme and to isolate it. For a long time unsuccessfully because the complex was too fragile and fell apart at each attempt to isolate it from the membrane. We found the fragments, but were unable to piece them together again," explains Professor Volker Müller from the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Bioenergetics at Goethe University.
Through hard work and perseverance, his doctoral researchers Martin Kuhns and Dragan Trifunovic then achieved a breakthrough in two successive doctoral theses. "In our desperation, we at some point took a heat-loving bacterium, Thermotoga maritima, which grows at temperatures between 60 and 90°C," explains Trifunovic, who will shortly complete his doctorate. "Thermotoga also contains Rnf genes, and we hoped that the Rnf enzyme in this bacterium would be a bit more stable. Over the years, we then managed to develop a method for isolating the entire Rnf enzyme from the membrane of these bacteria."
A good signal for anyone with knee problems - but also a strong signal of emerging knowledge of DNA and proteomics
"Cartilage has practically zero regenerative potential in adulthood, so once it's injured or gone, what we can do for patients has been very limited," said assistant professor of surgery Charles K.F. Chan, Ph.D. "It's extremely gratifying to find a way to help the body regrow this important tissue."
Researchers find method to regrow cartilage in the joints
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered a way to regenerate, in mice and human tissue, the cushion of cartilage found in joints.
Loss of this slippery and shock-absorbing tissue layer, called articular cartilage, is responsible for many cases of joint pain and arthritis, which afflicts more than 55 million Americans. Nearly one in four adult Americans suffer from arthritis, and far more are burdened by joint pain and inflammation generally.
The Stanford researchers figured out how to regrow articular cartilage by first causing slight injury to the joint tissue, then using chemical signals to steer the growth of skeletal stem cells as the injuries heal. The work was published Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Medicine.
The work builds on previous research at Stanford that resulted in isolation of the skeletal stem cell, a self-renewing cell that is also responsible for the production of bone, cartilage and a special type of cell that helps blood cells develop in bone marrow. The new research, like previous discoveries of mouse and human skeletal stem cells, were mostly carried out in the laboratories of Chan and professor of surgery Michael Longaker, MD.
This is a signal worth watching - the possible beginning of environmental management via domesticated DNA - will it be better - worse - different than chemical pesticides?
Genetically modified mosquitoes have been OK’d for a first U.S. test flight
As dengue cases rise in the Florida Keys, a much-debated public health tool gets a nod for 2021
After a decade of fits and starts, officials in the Florida Keys have voted to allow the first test in the United States of free-flying, genetically modified mosquitoes as a way to fight the pests and the diseases they spread.
The decision came after about two hours of contentious testimony in a virtual public hearing on August 18. Many speakers railed against uncertainties in releasing genetically engineered organisms. In the end, though, worries about mosquito-borne diseases proved more compelling. On the day of the vote, dengue fever cases in Monroe County, where the Keys are located, totaled 47 so far in 2020, the first surge in almost a decade.
The same mosquitoes known for yellow fever (Aedes aegypti) also spread dengue as well as Zika and Chikungunya. The species is especially hard to control among about 45 kinds of mosquitoes that whine around the Keys. Even the powerhouse Florida Keys Mosquito Control District with six aircraft for spraying — Miami has zero — kills only an estimated 30 to 50 percent of the local yellow fever mosquito population with its best pesticide treatments, says district board chairman Phil Goodman.
Another signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics.
Exxon Ends 92-Year Run on Dow Jones
Spending 92 years doing anything is an accomplishment, so let’s cheers to Exxon Mobil Corp., which spent more than nine decades as a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, pillaging the planet, lying about climate change, and making rich people even richer.
Now, those days have come to an end. One of the biggest oil companies on Earth has hemorrhaged money this year, and now it’s been booted from the Dow Jones because it just isn’t the superpower it once was. I almost feel bad for Big Oil these days. Almost.
The news of Exxon’s removal from the Dow Jones comes amid a pandemic that has absolutely crushed oil. We’ve seen nearly every major oil player turn to layoffs, freak out about collapsed demand, and write down their value while smaller companies default on loans or go bankrupt. The oil industry as we know it is going through a crisis that’s basically unprecedented, and Exxon being kicked off one of the classic benchmarks of the stock market is yet another sign of the upheaval.
This is for fun - my kids are grown - but when my grandboys visit - I want to do this with them. The Graphics are very clear and the process is doable by anyone.
Giant Sidewalk Chalk
Super-sized sidewalk chalk!
Have you eaten way too many Pringles in quarantine and have a giant bag of plaster laying around? Make some giant sidewalk chalk!
Supplies:
Materials:
2+ Pringles cans
Plaster of Paris
Duct tape
Tempura paint (optional, make sure it's washable and non toxic)
Water
Empty milk jug (not pictured)
Tools:
Bucket
Stir stick
Plastic cups (for scooping/measuring)
Cutting device
Can Opener
Have you eaten way too many Pringles in quarantine and have a giant bag of plaster laying around? Make some giant sidewalk chalk!
Supplies:
Materials:
2+ Pringles cans
Plaster of Paris
Duct tape
Tempura paint (optional, make sure it's washable and non toxic)
Water
Empty milk jug (not pictured)
Tools:
Bucket
Stir stick
Plastic cups (for scooping/measuring)
Cutting device
Can Opener
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