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:
Adam Smith warned us about sympathising with the elites
Alchemy Arrives in a Burst of Light
Nourish your imagination and you will be forever free
Articles:
Building the Mathematical Library of the Future
Neuronlike circuits bring brainlike computers a step closer
Engineers print wearable sensors directly on skin without heat
Easy-to-make, ultra-low power electronics could charge out of thin air
France to test 'flying taxis' from next year: operators
Waymo removing backup drivers from its autonomous vehicles
Alphabet's X lab announces "Mineral" project to increase sustainable food production
Treeswift's autonomous robots take flight to save forests
Satellites could soon map every tree on Earth
Forearm artery reveals humans evolving from changes in natural selection
The Hydraulic Press Channel Is the Internet Sensation of Our Time
In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith developed a theory of psychology based on ‘sympathy’ and outlined a way of living based on ‘reason and philosophy’. These ideas not only banish the (already disappearing) stereotype of Smith as a pioneer of free-market policies, but challenge some of our most cherished ideas about the sources of happiness.
Published 17 years before The Wealth of Nations (1776), Moral Sentiments begins by rejecting the idea that people are basically self-interested. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others,’ Smith declares. We are often motivated, and indeed dominated, by our emotional involvement with our ideas about other people, which Smith calls ‘sympathy’.
Sympathy, Smith believed, was inseparable from imagination and from reasoning. We can’t access what other people feel. Instead, we imagine what other people must be feeling, or rather what we believe that we would feel if we were in their position.
Adam Smith warned us about sympathising with the elites
Imagine, though, that it’s possible to invoke a desired property in more or less any material by using light pulses to reshape the way the electrons are distributed. In this view, electron band structure is not something fixed by the material itself: The bands instead become a kind of putty that can be molded into whatever form you desire. Find the right control pulse and you might be able to join an array of mobile electrons into Cooper pairs, say, and thereby make a superconductor, perhaps from some humble substance such as iron or copper, under conditions in which it would otherwise be impossible.
Alchemy Arrives in a Burst of Light
Imagination enables us to leave the here and now, to explore the past, as well as alternative presents and the future, before coming back. Imagination is a loop by which we temporarily disengage from ongoing life. The bored student who looks out of the window, wishing to be in the nearby forest; the dentist’s client browsing a magazine and dreaming about exotic temples; young people demonstrating for the climate – all are imagining.
Imagination is both mundane and fundamental: we imagine when we remember the forest, wonder where stars come from or consider moving home. We also imagine when, on our sofas, we willingly surrender to a film or a novel, taking us to another world. Also, we can imagine alone or with others: sharing imagination, we can deepen our relations, as when we discuss the film we just saw, or we can change the world – as when teams of scientists sent the first rocket to the Moon. Hence, imagination has consequences: it refreshes us, it brings us to understand things, it opens new possibilities, and it can lead us to action, from contacting an old friend to buying a plane ticket.
Imagination is a movement of mind, which can be more or less embodied. It enables us to expand our lived experience, or our ‘lifeworld’, beyond the limitation of the concrete situation we’re in. Children play, and some create imaginary companions; people with particularly vivid imagination build parallel worlds, some of which they describe in novels. These are forms of symbolic mobility. Yet of course another way to expand one’s lifeworld is to move in the physical realm: to travel, to visit the world, to see other places and modes of living. Now, one might wonder, what is the relation between imagination as symbolic mobility and actual geographical mobility?
Nourish your imagination and you will be forever free
Tomora maráŋ is an Ik adage meaning ‘It’s good to share.’
the Ik believe that the landscape is inhabited with spirits called kíʝáwika, which literally means children of the earth. They are believed to bring misfortune to individuals who fail to share with others and to reward those who are especially generous.
Neither nasty nor brutish
This is a fascinating signal of the future of mathematics and knowledge use and creation.
There are huge, important areas of math that have never been fully written down. They’re stored in the minds of a small circle of people who learned their subfield of math from people who learned it from the person who invented it — which is to say, it exists nearly as folklore.
Building the Mathematical Library of the Future
Digitizing mathematics is a longtime dream. The expected benefits range from the mundane — computers grading students’ homework — to the transcendent: using artificial intelligence to discover new mathematics and find new solutions to old problems. Mathematicians expect that proof assistants could also review journal submissions, finding errors that human reviewers occasionally miss, and handle the tedious technical work that goes into filling in all the details of a proof.
But first, the mathematicians who gather on Zulip must furnish Lean with what amounts to a library of undergraduate math knowledge, and they’re only about halfway there. Lean won’t be solving open problems anytime soon, but the people working on it are almost certain that in a few years the program will at least be able to understand the questions on a senior-year final exam.
And after that, who knows? The mathematicians participating in these efforts don’t fully anticipate what digital mathematics will be good for.
Still a weak signal - this is an important step in developing one new computational paradigm.
Neuronlike circuits bring brainlike computers a step closer
For the first time, my colleagues and I have built a single electronic device that is capable of copying the functions of neuron cells in a brain. We then connected 20 of them together to perform a complicated calculation. This work shows that it is scientifically possible to make an advanced computer that does not rely on transistors to calculate and that uses much less electrical power than today’s data centers.
….a major step further and built a circuit with 20 of these elements connected to one another through a network of devices that can be programmed to have particular capacitances, or abilities to store electric charge. He then mapped a mathematical problem to the capacitances in the network, which allowed him to use the device to find the solution to a small version of a problem that is important in a wide range of modern analytics.
The performance of computers is rapidly reaching a limit because the size of the smallest transistor in integrated circuits is now approaching 20 atoms wide. Any smaller and the physical principles that determine transistor behavior no longer apply. There is a high-stakes competition to see if someone can build a much better transistor, a method for stacking transistors or some other device that can perform the tasks that currently require thousands of transistors.
This quest is important because people have become used to the exponential improvement of computing capacity and efficiency of the past 40 years, and many business models and our economy have been built on this expectation. Engineers and computer scientists have now constructed machines that collect enormous amounts of data, which is the ore from which the most valuable commodity, information, is refined. The volume of that data is almost doubling every year, which is outstripping the capability of today’s computers to analyze it.
This isn’t digital smart tattoo as an interface for our bio-computer - yet. A good signal of the future of medical and other sensors.
Engineers print wearable sensors directly on skin without heat
Wearable sensors are evolving from watches and electrodes to bendable devices that provide far more precise biometric measurements and comfort for users. Now, an international team of researchers has taken the evolution one step further by printing sensors directly on human skin without the use of heat.
Led by Huanyu "Larry" Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics, the team published their results in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
"In this article, we report a simple yet universally applicable fabrication technique with the use of a novel sintering aid layer to enable direct printing for on-body sensors,"
The sensors are capable of precisely and continuously capturing temperature, humidity, blood oxygen levels and heart performance signals, according to Cheng. The researchers also linked the on-body sensors into a network with wireless transmission capabilities to monitor the combination of signals as they progress.
The process is also environmentally friendly, Cheng said. The sensor remains robust in tepid water for a few days, but a hot shower will easily remove it.
"It could be recycled, since removal doesn't damage the device," Cheng said. "And, importantly, removal doesn't damage the skin, either. That's especially important for people with sensitive skin, like the elderly and babies. The device can be useful without being an extra burden to the person using it or to the environment."
And here’s a signal about self-powering devices and sensors.
Easy-to-make, ultra-low power electronics could charge out of thin air
Researchers have developed a new approach to printed electronics which allows ultra-low power electronic devices that could recharge from ambient light or radio-frequency noise. The approach paves the way for low-cost printed electronics that could be seamlessly embedded in everyday objects and environments.
researchers from the University of Cambridge, working with collaborators from China and Saudi Arabia, have developed an approach for printed electronics that could be used to make low-cost devices that recharge out of thin air. Even the ambient radio signals that surround us would be enough to power them. Their results are published in the journal ACS Nano.
The technology developed by the researchers delivers high-performance electronic circuits based on thin-film transistors which are 'ambipolar' as they use only one semiconducting material to transport both negative and positive electric charges in their channels, in a region of operation called 'deep subthreshold' – a phrase that essentially means that the transistors are operated in a region that is conventionally regarded as their 'off' state. The team coined the phrase 'deep-subthreshold ambipolar' to refer to unprecedented ultra-low operating voltages and power consumption levels.
This is an interesting small signal regarding the transformation of transportation - recalling the projected future of the 1950s
France to test 'flying taxis' from next year: operators
"Flying taxis" will start taking off from an aerodrome north of Paris as soon as next June, operators said, in a trial ahead of a vast tourist influx for the 2024 Olympics.
The experiment will take place at the Pontoise-Cormeilles-en-Vexin aerodrome some 90 minutes northwest of the capital by car, according to a joint announcement by the Ile-de-France region, airports operator Groupe ADP and the RATP public transport agency.
A good signal of the progress being made in self-driving vehicles.
Waymo removing backup drivers from its autonomous vehicles
Waymo is allowing the general public to hitch a ride in its driverless autonomous vehicles in Phoenix, expanding a service it had been quietly offering to a select group of riders for the past year.
The service launches to the general public Thursday. The vehicles, which will have no back-up drivers behind the wheel to take over in sticky situations, will serve an area of 50 square miles. There won't be anyone watching remotely who can take over in an emergency and drive the car.
Before the coronavirus struck, which reduced demand for rides, Waymo was providing 1,000 to 2,000 rides in autonomous vehicles per week. Most of the rides had a backup driver behind the wheel, but 5% to 10% of the rides were without a human backup driver and were available only to a smaller group of riders who signed non-disclosure agreements. Waymo did not disclose how many fully autonomous vehicles will be available to the public in the Phoenix area.
This is a great signal of the affordances of AI, self-driving vehicles and big data in increasing our capacity to grow more and better food.
Alphabet's X lab announces "Mineral" project to increase sustainable food production
Alphabet's X lab, formerly a Google division, has announced via blog post that it has formally named its newest "moonshot" project Mineral. The project will be geared toward using new and novel methods to increase sustainable food production. Alphabet X has also set up a web page outlining the goals of the project.
As noted on the team's blog post, to feed the billions of people expected to be populating the Earth in the coming years, changes are required in food production. The team at Mineral suggests that such changes should involve the use of new approaches, techniques and tools. Such tools and techniques, they say, should involve the development of new kinds of hardware, software and the way they are built and used in agricultural efforts.
One example is a robotic buggy that the team has deployed in several locations. Each of the robots drives over cropland along the same paths used by tractors so as to not disturb the plants, autonomously collecting data. Each plant is photographed and sensors collect data about the plant and the soil in which it is growing. The data from the robots is then analyzed and used to make changes to farming practices that will result in greater yields.
And another strong signal of the growing use and possibilities of self-driving and self-energizing AI machines and sensors
"2020 will begin a decade of climate action," Chen says. "Big companies are looking to reduce their carbon emissions and they're looking to forests to see how these resources can be used to assist them in this effort. We need to know what's going on in the forest. Data will help us do that."
Not only will this data provide much needed insight into the health of forests, but the current lack of data has devastating effects.
Treeswift's autonomous robots take flight to save forests
Chen founded Treeswift as a spin-off company from Penn Engineering's GRASP Lab. The idea behind it is simple: use robotic tools to automate forestry and reduce risk for human workers. Treeswift uses swarms of autonomous, flying robots equipped with LiDAR sensors to monitor, inventory, and map timberland. The drones collect images of the land and render them into 3-D maps that can be analyzed for precise, quantifiable measurements of a given forest's biomass.
Of the variety of applications this data has, Treeswift is focused on three main targets: calculating inventory for the timber industry, mapping forests for preservation, and measuring forest biomass and fuel to prevent the spread of wildfires. The collected data can be used by researchers in a variety of industries to assess the health of forests and build predictive models that can aid in climate change action initiatives.
Now if we think of these drones as mobile sensors meshwork linked with each other and AI and satellites and Google Earth (or something like it) as a virtual world (like Second Life) - we can begin to image what affordances can be enabled for a new form of consciousness
Satellites could soon map every tree on Earth
An analysis of satellite images has pinpointed individual tree canopies over a large area of West Africa. The data suggest that it will soon be possible, with certain limitations, to map the location and size of every tree worldwide.
Terrestrial ecosystems are defined in large part by their woody plants. Grasslands, shrublands, savannahs, woodlands and forests represent a series of gradations in tree and shrub density, from ecosystems with low-density, low-stature woody plants to those with taller trees and overlapping canopies. Accurate information on the woody-vegetation structure of ecosystems is, therefore, fundamental to our understanding of global-scale ecology, biogeography and the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, water and other nutrients. Writing in Nature, Brandt et al. report their analysis of a massive database of high-resolution satellite images covering more than 1.3 million square kilometres of the western Sahara and Sahel regions of West Africa. The authors mapped the location and size of more than 1.8 billion individual tree canopies; never before have trees been mapped at this level of detail across such a large area.
The spatial resolution of most satellite data is relatively coarse, with individual image pixels generally corresponding to areas on the ground that are larger than 100 square metres, and often larger than one square kilometre. This limitation has forced researchers in the field of Earth observation to focus on measuring bulk properties, such as the proportion of a landscape covered by tree canopies when viewed from above (a measurement known as canopy cover).
The more we change - the more we have changed. An interesting signal of emerging human evolution.
this study into the prevalence of the artery over generations shows that modern humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any point in the past 250 years.
Forearm artery reveals humans evolving from changes in natural selection
Humans haven't developed genetic mutations for telepathy or superpowers just yet, but a new study shows our species is still evolving in unique ways and changes in the natural selection could be the major reason.
An investigation by Dr. Teghan Lucas at Flinders University and Professor Maciej Henneberg and Dr. Jaliya Kumaratilake at the University of Adelaide published in the Journal of Anatomy has shown a significant increase in the prevalence of the median artery in humans since the late 19th century.
The median artery is the main vessel that supplies blood to the human forearm and hand, when first formed in the mother's womb but it disappears once two arteries seen in adults develop. But many people now retain the median artery for their whole life in addition to the other two arteries (about one in three).
This evolutionary trend will continue in those born 80 years from today, with the median artery becoming a common in the human forearm.
This is a strong signal of the emerging strength of the artisanal movement for food and drink - unlike industrial grade mass produced food - unprocessed food varies like with with season and terroir.
How to enjoy coffee
Smooth like chocolate or fruity like a berry, coffee has as many tastes as wine or beer – you just need to know your beans
Coffee hasn’t always received the attention it deserves. In many Western countries especially, the beans were low quality. Drinkers didn’t know or care about how coffee was produced, bought or brewed. A lot of coffee was cheap and tasted bitter, and its purpose was practical: medicine or fuel.
But over the past few decades, things have started to change around the world. A global band of intrepid producers, buyers, roasters, baristas and scientists have been elevating coffee to the craft level, like fine wine and beer. You might think that you know what coffee tastes like – roasted, toasty and bitter – but that’s only a sliver of the variety available to you now.
Coffee – what’s called ‘drip’ or ‘filter’ coffee, not espresso – can taste smooth and sweet like chocolate, or provide a zip on your tongue like a bright Champagne, or taste fruity, just like a blueberry. And when I say ‘chocolate’ or ‘blueberry’, I mean the coffee itself literally tastes like those things, without any added syrups or flavourings. The first time you drink coffee that tastes like more than coffee, you’ll never forget it.
This expansion of flavours is partly down to a global trend towards new roasting techniques. All coffee roasters create a roast profile – a manipulation of time and temperature – to achieve flavour in the beans. Historically, coffee has been roasted for relatively long periods of time at relatively high temperatures (think of traditional Italian coffee culture or the giant coffee chains in the United States). This profile tends to emphasise roast character, the flavours imparted by the roasting process – akin to how the process of ageing bourbon in oak barrels imparts a distinct flavour to the spirit. But more recently, distinct coffee cultures – including those of North America, Australia, Britain, Scandinavia and Japan – have been pushing other roasting techniques forward, ones that focus on the qualities of the bean. For example, roasting at relatively low temperatures for a shorter amount of time tends to accentuate what I call coffee character, the unique flavours inherent in the bean itself and where it was grown – or its terroir, to borrow a term from wine.
We are in the midst of crazy times - climate change - covid apocalypse - crises of democracy - it’s hard to not get depressed - but here’s a great signal of when depression provides delight and secret satisfactions. The videos are the magic antidepressant elixir.
The Hydraulic Press Channel Is the Internet Sensation of Our Time
We spoke to the creative minds behind the channel about the human need to destroy.
Lauri and Anni Vuohensilta have been crushing it. The Finnish couple began pulverizing random objects under a 150-ton hydraulic press at their family’s factory five years ago this month, carving out their own genre of “satisfying” internet videos and amassing more than 10 million followers across major social media platforms in the process.
On a video call, I interviewed the Vuohensiltas about what’s left to crush, why the channel appeals to so many people, Lauri’s delightful accent, the effects of the coronavirus on their hydraulic pressing, and how people who don’t have a hydraulic press can fulfill their human need for destruction.
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