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:
To Karl Jaspers, uncertainty is not to be overcome but understood
Articles:
Researchers develop anti-bacterial graphene face masks
Introduction: The Software Age
How next-gen computer generated maps detect partisan gerrymandering
Study suggests unconscious learning underlies belief in God
Discoverer of neural circuits for parenting wins US$3 million Breakthrough Prize
Live bacteria spray is showing promise in treating childhood eczema
Scientists create a robot made entirely of living cells
Flipping light on-off turns bacteria into chemical factories
Sampling the gut microbiome with an ingestible pill
many threads all finally converge in the counterintuitive thesis of The Force of Nonviolence: that nonviolence is not the antithesis of self-defense but rather is self-defense. Butler raises this provocative claim as a rejoinder to left discourses of violent resistance. Counterviolence, so the argument goes, is required to defend the oppressed from the systemic violence they suffer. The Force of Nonviolence responds not by challenging the tactical wisdom of these arguments, but instead by questioning the very idea of self at their core. Once the self is seen in relational terms, sustained through bonds that exceed sovereign control, the goal of defending the self is turned inside out, since it must now encompass protecting and expanding the social infrastructure through which lives can be more equitably lived. Acts of violence that put these bonds at risk are not simply immoral, they are self-defeating. “Violence against the other is, in this sense,” Butler writes, “violence against oneself, something that becomes clear when we recognize that violence assaults the living interdependency that is, or should be, our social world.” Nonviolence is the practice of tending to this web of “living interdependency,” or as she calls it elsewhere in the book, life itself.
Bonds of interdependence are the sources of both life and aggression. They endow us with worth and care, yet they also continually remind the ego of the limits of its power and its dependency on others.
Coupling confrontation and care means to do more than simply “expose” unseen violence, as Butler repeatedly suggest; it means to meet people where they are and help educate their judgments to see some issue—and their own relation to it—anew. This is interdependence as something to be made not found, a political project of constructing a new public around an issue rather than returning people to some existential facts of the human condition.
Inventing Nonviolence
Jaspers is one of the very few existentialist thinkers who did not seek to master, tame or conquer the unknowable and finite condition of human life. Instead, he tried to cultivate a relationship to this essential quality of life and engage it on its own terms. He repeatedly insisted that ‘I do not accomplish my freedom. I did not make myself. I do not exist by my own means.’ Rather, I depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world. Only because our lives are contingent and vulnerable can we experience love, freedom and purpose as something meaningful. The attempt to prove love or catch the ephemeral presence of beauty would likely take away the experience.
What we come to understand in moments of happiness, loss and tragedy is that we cannot possess meaning, we cannot own who we authentically are or determine our identity. Uncertainty was not something to overcome for Jaspers. He rather considered it the ground of ideas such as freedom, truth and justice that can be defined only negatively, through what they are not, or not yet.
But how should it be possible to think this relational truth and uncertainty together? Jaspers believed that we might not be able to come to an agreement about who we are and what we want to be, but we can agree on what we don’t know and how we’d like to act toward this nonknowledge. There is containment in the expression of uncertainty. It generates a humble, but highly resistant and communicative approach to the world. ‘All thoughts,’ Jaspers therefore concluded, ‘could be judged by this touchstone question, do they aid or hinder communication.’
To Karl Jaspers, uncertainty is not to be overcome but understood
This is an interesting and testable insight - AI-ssistants for everyone - the question is who is the AI-ssistant assisting
Experiment if you’re game: start a social media account and follow people and places that have the opposite of your ideology. Watch what the algorithm feeds that account. Compare to yours. We are not that different. We are being pitted against each other. IMOIMOIMO
This is a great 14min video of Kevin Kelly giving 68 great tips on his 68th birthday
68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice
It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.
I think we can expect to see this as a mass produced product soon - even if Covid-19 is controlled via a vaccine - there are all manner of uses now and in the future.
Researchers develop anti-bacterial graphene face masks
Face masks have become an important tool in fighting against the COVID-19 pandemic. However, improper use or disposal of masks may lead to "secondary transmission". A research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has successfully produced graphene masks with an anti-bacterial efficiency of 80%, which can be enhanced to almost 100% with exposure to sunlight for around 10 minutes. Initial tests also showed very promising results in the deactivation of two species of coronaviruses. The graphene masks are easily produced at low cost, and can help to resolve the problems of sourcing raw materials and disposing of non-biodegradable masks.
The research is conducted by Dr. Ye Ruquan, Assistant Professor from CityU's Department of Chemistry, in collaboration with other researchers. The findings were published in the scientific journal ACS Nano, titled "Self-Reporting and Photothermally Enhanced Rapid Bacterial Killing on a Laser-Induced Graphene Mask".
This is a long - but very interesting history of what seems to be a ubiquitous aspect of our reality - a metaphor for understanding culture, language and more.
Introduction: The Software Age
1953 - “Software” was merely a prank
1963 - “Software” became an industry
1973 - “The Software Age” has begun!
In October, 1953, I coined the word 'software.'
The notion of software as a separate thing from hardware took years to assert itself. Sure, the computer (popularly referred to as a "giant brain" in the early fifties) was unable to do anything but consume electrical power until a "programmer" came along to "program" it, and the consequent "routines" resided in the computer's "memory" thereafter. One did not, in the beginning, take a program written for one computer and put it into another. A half-century later, most people will find that hard to imagine.
As originally conceived, the word 'software' was merely an obvious way to distinguish a program from the computer itself. A program comprised sequences of written -- changeable -- instructions each endowed with the power to command the behavior of the permanently crafted machinery -- the "hardware."
For the origin of the word 'software,' most dictionaries give an unknown source and 1960 as the date, but [expletive deleted] I was there! That's the only exclamation point I intend to use in this introduction.
This is a fascinating signal - of the power of easily producing many versions - can illustrate the flaws of one version - this is especially important as the digital environment can enable a form of transparent accessible comparisons of policy.
The party that controls the maps can grab power through packing or cracking. In packing, politicians cram voters from the opposing party into just a few districts, securing the remaining districts for their own party. The blue ruling party created one all-red district, and three majority blue districts. In cracking, politicians spread voters from the opposing party across districts, blocking them from gaining a majority.
How next-gen computer generated maps detect partisan gerrymandering
Researchers are ready to expose hidden biases when redistricting begins in 2021
In October 2019, a state court determined that North Carolina’s congressional districts had been severely gerrymandered and struck down the state’s map. The court’s ruling was informed, in part, by tens of thousands of alternative maps demonstrating that the district boundaries had very likely been manipulated for political gain, the very definition of gerrymandering.
Researchers had generated a slew of alternative, computer-generated maps designed to help identify potential patterns of bias. The approach is increasingly used, alongside other tests, to ferret out alleged gerrymandering. District manipulations can be so subtle that they’re undetectable just by looking at them. “The eyeball test is no good,” says Jonathan Katz, a political scientist and statistician at Caltech.
U.S. states redraw their district lines every 10 years to adjust for changing demographics picked up by the national census. The last round a decade ago raised eyebrows, most notably for districts drawn in Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.
“The post-2010 round of redistricting is widely viewed as a time of extreme, even egregious, partisan gerrymandering,” retired political scientist Richard Engstrom wrote in the January 2020 Social Science Quarterly.
This is a very interesting weak signal - although the discussion is focused on the belief in God - if we replace the concept of ‘god’ with ‘conspiracy theory’ this could contribute to an understanding of how people with capacity to reason - fall prey to - well conspiracies.
"This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power,"
"A brain that is more predisposed to implicit pattern learning may be more inclined to believe in a god no matter where in the world that brain happens to find itself, or in which religious context,"
Study suggests unconscious learning underlies belief in God
Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.
Their research, reported in the journal, Nature Communications, is the first to use implicit pattern learning to investigate religious belief. The study spanned two very different cultural and religious groups, one in the U.S. and one in Afghanistan.
The goal was to test whether implicit pattern learning is a basis of belief and, if so, whether that connection holds across different faiths and cultures. The researchers indeed found that implicit pattern learning appears to offer a key to understanding a variety of religions.
This is an interesting signal about emerging depths of knowledge and the domestication of DNA - and relationships to behavioral consequences.
Discoverer of neural circuits for parenting wins US$3 million Breakthrough Prize
Biologist Catherine Dulac netted one of four big life-sciences awards. Also announced were one for mathematics and two for physics.
Discovering the “on-and-off switch” for good parenting in both male and female mouse brains has earned Catherine Dulac, a molecular biologist at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science and mathematics. Three other major prizes in biology, plus two in physics and one in mathematics, were also announced on 10 September, together with a number of smaller prizes.
“Catherine Dulac has done amazing work that has really transformed the field,” says biologist Lauren O’Connell, at Stanford University, California. Dulac’s team provided the first evidence that male and female mouse brains have the same neural circuitry associated with parenting, which is just triggered differently in each sex1. “It went against the dogma that for decades said that male and female brains are organized differently,” says O’Connell.
To elucidate the neural mechanisms at play, Dulac identified a protein called galanin that is expressed by neurons involved in parenting. Killing the neurons in females stopped them parenting, while activating them in virgin males made them maternal. “It’s like an on-and-off switch for parenting,” says Dulac. “It’s extraordinary.” Her team then used the galanin marker to track the specific circuitry associated with the motivational, hormonal and behavioural changes needed for nurturing.
An interesting signal about the future of medicine - the domestication of our microbiomes.
Live bacteria spray is showing promise in treating childhood eczema
Here’s a shorthand way to think of my research: Using bugs as drugs may one day bring hope to soaps.
Patients with atopic dermatitis, more commonly known as eczema, suffer from dry, itchy skin and rashes, and have a higher risk of developing hay fever, asthma and food allergies. The cause of eczema is still unknown, but studies completed by my team and others continue to suggest that manipulating the skin microbiome – the community of all the bacteria and other microorganisms living on the surface of the skin – may offer therapeutic benefits to patients.
We hypothesized that if we directly sprayed live bacteria named Roseomonas mucosa - a naturally occurring skin microbe - on the skin of patients with eczema, those healthy bacteria might make for healthy skin.
This is still a weak signal - but imagine a swarm of biobots delivering medicine and/or being the medical device for all manner of ‘taking out the garbage’ and adding the nutrients and more in our bodies and environment and agriculturing activities (remembering that every single technology can be weaponized).
Scientists create a robot made entirely of living cells
'Xenobots' could be used to clean up microplastics or deliver medication in the body
Scientists have unveiled the first ever "living robot," an organism made up of living cells, which can move around, carry payloads, and even heal itself.
"All of the computational people on the project, myself included, were flabbergasted," said Joshua Bongard, a computer scientist at the University of Vermont.
"We didn't realize that this was possible."
Teams from the University of Vermont and Tufts University worked together to build what they're calling "xenobots," which are about the size of a grain of salt and are made up of the heart and skin cells from frogs.
"The particular frog that we borrowed these cells from is known as Xenopus laevis," Bongard told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.
"But Xeno is also in Greek stands for alien, or unknown, or different, or new, and we think both interpretations apply to this new kind of technology."
Learning to control our bio-nano-computational bots and fabrication technologies - is vital.
Flipping light on-off turns bacteria into chemical factories
Researchers at Princeton University have created a new and improved way to more precisely control genetically engineered bacteria: by simply switching the lights on and off. Working in E. coli, the workhorse organism for scientists to engineer metabolism, researchers developed a system for controlling one of the key genetic circuits needed to turn bacteria into chemical factories that produce valuable compounds such as the biofuel isobutanol.
"All you need is illumination," said José Avalos, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University and at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment", and senior author of the findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology. "There are lots of potential benefits, one of them being the ability to easily tune and reverse the induction signal."
The new work builds on Avalos and his colleagues' previous work, described in Nature in 2018, in which they engineered of yeast to produce chemicals in the presence or absence of light. E. coli, however, is even more widely used by scientists and engineers than yeast.
This is another good signal of our exploration into the inner space of our own ecology - the digital environment is exponentially creating massive data through ever more sensors - in ever more places. Finding out about who we really are.
Sampling the gut microbiome with an ingestible pill
Gut microbes affect human health, but there is still much to learn, in part because they're not easy to collect. But researchers now report in ACS Nano that they have developed an ingestible capsule that in rat studies captured bacteria and other biological samples while passing through the gastrointestinal (GI) tract.
Currently, researchers obtain gut microbes by collecting stool samples or using techniques such as colonoscopy or endoscopy. However, stool samples can't capture all the microorganisms in the upper GI tract, and they can't keep microbes from different parts of the tract separate. Colonoscopy and endoscopy are invasive procedures, which deters some patients. Sarvesh Kumar Srivastava and colleagues wanted to avoid these drawbacks by designing a device that could be swallowed and then eliminated.
The researchers developed a self-polymerizing reaction system of poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate monomer, iron chloride and ascorbic acid—all loaded into tiny hollow cylinders. The cylindrical microdevices were packaged in miniature gelatin capsules, which were coated with a protective layer to prevent digestion in the stomach's acidic environment. After they were fed to rats, the capsules remained protected in the stomach but disintegrated in the small intestine's more-neutral pH, releasing the microdevices. Exposure to intestinal fluid caused the cylinders' chemical cargo to polymerize, forming a hydrogel that trapped microbes and protein biomarkers in its surroundings, much like an instant snapshot of the intestine.
No comments:
Post a Comment