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:
Chinese philosophy has long known that mental health is communal
Bitcoin As A Meme And A Future
Articles:
Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid
Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
Spain to launch trial of four-day working week
The world's first 3D printed eco-habitat
Wave of SIM swapping attacks hit US cryptocurrency users
Bonnie Bassler on Talkative Bacteria and Eavesdropping Viruses
Nature’s recipe book of the future
Previously unknown bacteria discovered on the space station could help grow plants
Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
No one can be wise before earning their lot of winters
in this world. The wise one, they stay patient:
not too heart-heated, not so hasty to harp,
not too weak-armed, nor too wan-headed,
nor too fearful nor too fey nor too fee-felching,
and never tripping the tongue too much, before it trips them.
The Wanderer
Mental illness is often thought to be a matter of individual disorder. Modern psychiatry looks to features of individual experience, behaviour and thoughts to diagnose mental illness, and focuses on individual remedies to treat it. If you are depressed, this is understood as your response to circumstances, based on features of your genetics, disordered patterns of thinking, or personal problems and emotional states. Western treatment of mental illness follows these same individualistic lines. The individual is provided with medicine and therapy, which are certainly helpful.
But such an emphasis on the individual can lead us to neglect communal approaches to treatment. Often overlooked are the ways in which social norms, cultural beliefs and communal attitudes contribute to mental illness.
In an interview in 2018, the Dutch cultural psychologist Batja Mesquita said:
Many cultures don’t think about their emotions as something that lives inside of an individual, but more as something between people. In those cultures, emotions are what people do together, with each other. So when I’m angry, that is something that lives between you and me.
Chinese philosophy has long known that mental health is communal
If all money is a bet on the future, it is also a summoning of a future. When people design new money forms, it is usually with the goal of telling a new story about the future. Think of how euro notes have imaginary architecture — fictional bridges and arches intended to conjure a shared “European” past in order to project a shared European future.
My Bitcoin-curious acquaintances aren’t actively trying to bring about the demise of the old and birth of the new. They are trying to do their best to live in the “parentheses,” as anthropologist Jane Guyer puts it, between cataclysms. They’re not preppers, but they are assembling their go bags, using Wirecutter as their guide.
Sitting somewhere between are the folks of cryptocurrency Twitter. It is a cacophony of memes. During a time of isolation and doom scrolling, it’s funny and vital.
This vitality, these memes, are future-making. Memes perform powerful magic that turns absurdity and cynicism into the kind of true belief that can bend reality. Trump is a meme who was elected president. QAnon is a meme made into a religion. Tesla is a meme that is on the S&P 500. The GameStop rally was a meme that (sort of) beat Wall Street traders at their own game. Indeed, Elon Musk, the hero of the populist GameStop story, famously hates hedge funds because they call his bluffs — they literally bet against the futures that his billions are wrapped up in. When an incredibly absurd, cynical thing triumphs, the meme lords stare at the normies: How could you ever have doubted us?
But the logic of crypto memes is also one of deferral. They instruct people who hold Bitcoin to continue doing so. No matter how high the price climbs, do not sell. Keep holding out — or “hodling,” in meme parlance — waiting for a higher price, a more distant future. Hodling, of course, prevents a sell-off that would burst the bubble. This is the mechanism of cryptocurrency, and it’s the mechanism of the GameStop rally. Instead of hodling, the WallStreetBets subreddit talks about “diamond hands”: holding tight enough to forge something costly and beautiful out of mere carbon.
It’s a kind of scam: Everyone tells everyone else to keep the faith as they themselves sell off while the price is high. Eventually, it’s revealed that not everyone is actually hodling, and the price comes down. In the unwinding, those who kept the faith and didn’t sell are left with nothing but a devalued asset.
Bitcoin As A Meme And A Future
What are the connections between a banker working on a trading floor in London and a pastoralist herding animals across the grasslands of East Africa? More than you’d think. Let me explain how they’re connected; and why they can both learn from each other.
Both bankers and pastoralists must, as a matter of course, work with deep, pervasive uncertainty – where they don’t know the probability of future events. Both often confront ignorance – where they don’t know what they don’t know. These conditions of making important decisions amid incertitude require a very distinct approach to navigating day-to-day practices, as well as long-term futures.
Simple risk management is insufficient, as probabilities of events happening can’t be calculated and outcomes are unknown. Navigating pervasive uncertainty has important consequences, suggesting a particular approach to confronting a turbulent world.
The key to pastoralists’ survival and prosperity is actively managing uncertainty – not just reactive coping – and maintaining awareness of the dangers of ignorance and surprise.
Pastoralists therefore make use of ‘non-equilibrium’ environments – where stability or balance is never reached, as another perturbation always comes along.
Pastoralists must combine deep knowledge of the system, drawing on tacit, experiential knowledge, as well as more formal sources. They must always scan the horizon for potential threats, remembering past experiences and deeper histories, while being attuned to the immediate, practical, local challenges of the moment.
What pastoralists know
This is from last month but a worthwhile read for sustaining our optimism.
The first alarm bells about a potential new epidemic began sounding at the end of December 2019. By January 10 2020, scientists had not only isolated the responsible virus, but also sequenced its genome and published the information online.
Yuval Noah Harari: Lessons from a year of Covid
In a year of scientific breakthroughs — and political failures — what can we learn for the future?
How can we summarise the Covid year from a broad historical perspective? Many people believe that the terrible toll coronavirus has taken demonstrates humanity’s helplessness in the face of nature’s might. In fact, 2020 has shown that humanity is far from helpless. Epidemics are no longer uncontrollable forces of nature. Science has turned them into a manageable challenge.
Why, then, has there been so much death and suffering? Because of bad political decisions.
In previous eras, when humans faced a plague such as the Black Death, they had no idea what caused it or how it could be stopped. When the 1918 influenza struck, the best scientists in the world couldn’t identify the deadly virus, many of the countermeasures adopted were useless, and attempts to develop an effective vaccine proved futile.
The brother of Sasha - Simon is a world expert on autism. This is an important signal about the deep advantages to a species of neurodiversity.
Simon Baron-Cohen is a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.
- the three words are if, and, and then. I think that these three words describe how humans, Homo sapiens, are the only animal that can reason and can reason in order to invent.
Is autism the legacy of humans evolving the ability to innovate?
A new book argues that humans evolved innovation, and genes for autism, more than 70,000 years ago
If you find yourself pondering the marvel of aerodynamics when you fly on a plane, or if you concentrate on the structure of music as it plays, rather than simply listening, you may score high on measures of "systemization," according to University of Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen.
And if so this may reflect abilities that he thinks may have first evolved in humans between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago, when our human ancestors took a cognitive leap forward. This new capacity enabled them to analyze and understand patterns in the world that would, among other things, facilitate the invention of complex tools from bows to musical instruments.
In Baron-Cohen's new book, he argues that humans became "the scientific and technological masters of our planet" because of our brain's "systemizing mechanism." Also, some individuals — particularly those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, are the "hyper-systemizers" of our world. He suggests this should cause us to re-evaluate the capacities and strengths of people with autism.
This may be a very important signal - anticipating a new economic paradigm in the post Covid world.
in Spain – where a 44-day strike in Barcelona in 1919 resulted in the country becoming one of the first in western Europe to adopt the eight-hour workday
Spain to launch trial of four-day working week
Government agrees to proposal from leftwing party Más País allowing companies to test reduced hours
Spain could become one of the first countries in the world to trial the four-day working week after the government agreed to launch a modest pilot project for companies interested in the idea.
Earlier this year, the small leftwing Spanish party Más País announced that the government had accepted its proposal to test out the idea. Talks have since been held, with the next meeting expected to take place in the coming weeks.
“With the four-day work week (32 hours), we’re launching into the real debate of our times,” said Iñigo Errejón of Más País on Twitter. “It’s an idea whose time has come.”
We definitely need to re-imagine how we construct where we live and work. This is another signal of progress toward one possible approach.
WASP stands for ‘World’s Advanced Saving Project’ and was inspired by the potter wasp, which builds its own nest with material recovered from the surrounding environment.
The world's first 3D printed eco-habitat
A new circular model of housing entirely created with reusable and recyclable materials has taken form in Italy thanks to collaborative 3D printers. Welcome to the future.
In Massa Lombarda, a commune east of Bologna and Ravenna in Italy, carbon-neutral buildings are being created from clay sourced from local soil – and they’re adaptable to any climate and context. The ‘TECLA’ takes its name from ‘technology’ and ‘clay’ and is the world’s first fully 3D printed construction made from natural materials.
Designed by Mario Cucinella Architects and made with multiple 3D printers operating at the same time, TECLA is constructed by WASP, Italy’s 3D printing pioneers. It represents a real challenge for 3D printing, maximising the performance of the oldest of materials for the future of the green economy: the raw earth.
This is an important signal of the vulnerabilities of our devices in the digital environment.
Wave of SIM swapping attacks hit US cryptocurrency users
Something strange happened last week, with tens of US-based cryptocurrency users seeing SIM swapping attacks.
SIM swapping, also known as SIM jacking, is a type of ATO (account take over) attack during which a malicious threat actor uses various techniques (usually social engineering) to transfers a victim's phone number to their own SIM card.
The purpose of this attack is so that hackers can reset passwords or receive 2FA verification codes and access protected accounts.
These types of attacks have been going on for half a decade now, but they've exploded in 2017 and 2018 when attackers started focusing on attacking members of the cryptocurrency community, so they could gain access to online accounts used for managing large sums of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies.
But while these attacks were very popular last year, this year, the number of SIM swapping attacks appeared to have gone down, especially after law enforcement started cracking down and arresting some of the hackers involved in these schemes.
But despite a period of calm in the first half of the year, a rash of SIM swapping attacks have been reported in the second half of May, and especially over the past week.
In the age of social media in the digital environment - you have to love this signal about the ubiquity of ‘social media’.
the way bacteria get their power is that they communicate with a chemical language. They count their numbers and then they recognize when they have the right number of bacteria locally that, if all of them change their behavior in unison, they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish as individuals
They sense when there is a quorum, and then the quorum makes these decisions together.
And they all respond by changing their gene expression, which then changes their behavior. And they begin to carry out these group tasks.
Bonnie Bassler on Talkative Bacteria and Eavesdropping Viruses
The molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler is deciphering the chemical languages that bacteria use to coordinate their assaults on a host.
Bonnie Bassler, a molecular biologist at Princeton University, helped to revolutionize views on the sociability of bacteria by showing that they choreograph their collective actions through nuanced chemical conversations. In this discussion with host Steven Strogatz, Bassler describes how exquisitely sophisticated these conversations are, how bacteria wait to act until the numbers are on their side, and how viruses eavesdrop on the chatter.
This is a good signal of the emerging of citizen science - from a closet DNA lab to a kitchen exploring new materials - there is lots of work for 21st century makers and tinkerers.
Nature’s recipe book of the future
Cook up the regenerative materials of the future with these recipes for sustainable alternatives to plastics, ceramics and fabrics – created with ingredients you can find on your doorstep.
Take a cup of old coffee grounds, a handful of mussel shells, and a dash of green tea, and what have you got? Well, all sorts of useful stuff – alternative ceramics, planet-friendly plastics and fermented fabric. Not bad for a couple of hours in the kitchen.
You’ve entered the culinary world of Materiom, the circular design experts who are sharing recipes for materials that are useful, natural and simple enough for those of us who are less than blessed in the cooking department. “Our recipes use locally abundant natural ingredients and life-friendly chemistry. Plastics and composites you can cook on the stove, laser cut and 3D print.”
Is this a signal of a new domain of xenomorphic agriculture? Something to watch.
Previously unknown bacteria discovered on the space station could help grow plants
Four strains of bacteria, three of which were previously unknown to science, have been found on the space station. They may be used to help grow plants during long-term spaceflight missions in the future.
The study published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology.
The space station is a unique environment because it has been entirely isolated from Earth for years, so a multitude of experiments have been used to study what kind of bacteria is present there.
Eight specific spots on the space station have been continuously checked over the last six years for the presence of microbes and bacterial growth. These areas include modules where hundreds of scientific experiments are carried out; a growth chamber where plants are cultivated; as well as places where the crew comes together for meals and other occasions.
The four strains of bacteria that researchers isolated belong to the Methylobacteriaceae family. The microbes were taken from samples across the space station, during the expeditions of different crews that occurred consecutively. Species of Methylobacterium are helpful to plants, promoting their growth and fighting pathogens that affect them, among other things.
This is most definitely a very weak signal maybe more like science fiction - but who knows where this can lead in the next 100 years?
"This work has moved the problem of faster-than-light travel one step away from theoretical research in fundamental physics and closer to engineering. The next step is to figure out how to bring down the astronomical amount of energy needed to within the range of today's technologies, such as a large modern nuclear fission power plant. Then we can talk about building the first prototypes,"
Breaking the warp barrier for faster-than-light travel
If travel to distant stars within an individual's lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein's theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have 'exotic' physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities. In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast 'solitons' using sources with only positive energies that can enable travel at any speed. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics. The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
The author of the paper, Dr. Erik Lentz, analyzed existing research and discovered gaps in previous 'warp drive' studies. Lentz noticed that there existed yet-to-be explored configurations of space-time curvature organized into 'solitons' that have the potential to solve the puzzle while being physically viable. A soliton—in this context also informally referred to as a 'warp bubble'—is a compact wave that maintains its shape and moves at constant velocity. Lentz derived the Einstein equations for unexplored soliton configurations (where the space-time metric's shift vector components obey a hyperbolic relation), finding that the altered space-time geometries could be formed in a way that worked even with conventional energy sources. In essence, the new method uses the very structure of space and time arranged in a soliton to provide a solution to faster-than-light travel, which—unlike other research—would only need sources with positive energy densities. No exotic negative energy densities needed.
Just Cool
Now imagine this in 3D - as part of our education of the world around us.
River Birds
Touch any bird to hear its call
Birds are the most abundant group of vertebrate wildlife in all the natural environments in Spain. Rivers, far from being the exception to this rule, are home to many bird species: some go there to eat, or to nest or to rest, others follow the course of a river, using it as a migratory route to travel between Europe and Africa.
#micropoem
Daylight Saving Time -
has really messed me up -
I’m off kilter -
…. As if I was ever on kilter -
but now -
I'm off off -
which isn't a double negative -
it just worse -
I can be anywhere -
but I’m always somewhere -
even when I’m nowhere -
selfing -
in the afford-dances -
of impermanence -
and emptiness
that feeling -
of Homogeneity -
is so often a
view-from-outside -
on the inside -
all the parts are
different -
even if they seem to
belong -
unknowing of the complex -
unfinite partiality of -
entangled systems -
When we are loyal to a higher purpose -
Nation -
Science -
honest evidence -
we use ourselves to make
everyone progress -
when we are loyal to a
person - a
thority -
career-path -
we progress a few -
mhm -
shadowy shadows -
in guaranteed job -
shifts political-culture-narrative -
to ‘earning’ extrinsic rewards -
for creating-value -
that could kill -
rewards of pleasure-play -
so -
Universal-Basic-Assets -
is the platform -
of living in a world that loves you -
mhm -
Favorite Canadianism -
A?
Nice A!
Sorry A
mhm -
the discarded -
that journey the shadows -
to bring some light to the world -
It’s not about having the TRUTH -
it’s about suading a viable -
new direction -
afford-dancing -
some plausible -
anticipatory dreams -
mhm -
wise foresight -
engaging in the attractors of paradox -
