Thursday, March 25, 2021

Friday Thinking 26 March 2021

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



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 -

Thursday, March 18, 2021

Friday Thinking 19 March 2021

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:

Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice

New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations

Lessons from all democracies

Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy


Articles:

‘The ketamine blew my mind’: can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?

CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First

Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report

The road to electric is filled with tiny cars

Radical Reads: Exclusive Q&A with Geoffrey Hinton – A big idea for solving vision

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show

Recycled plastic bricks stronger than concrete

Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics

Organic materials essential for life on Earth are found for the first time on the surface of an asteroid

Behind the scenes of "Right up our Alley" bowling alley drone video

#micropoem





another approach to securing society and the freedom of those who depend upon it: collaborative security. Collaborative security is security with other people, the kind that mass vaccination schemes provide a community that develops herd immunity. A social system secured collaboratively relies, in the default, on providing the kind of protection accomplished with and often through protection of others. This is the kind of protection we could right now develop, for example, with a successful global effort to vaccinate as widely and deeply throughout our populations as possible. 

Universal Basic Income, Racial Justice, Climate Justice




Grade school math students are likely familiar with teachers admonishing them not to just guess the answer to a problem. But a new proof establishes that, in fact, the right kind of guessing is sometimes the best way to solve systems of linear equations, one of the bedrock calculations in math.

As a result, the proof establishes the first method capable of surpassing what had previously been a hard limit on just how quickly some of these types of problems can be solved.

New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations




Over several millennia and across multiple continents, early democracy was an institution in which rulers governed jointly with councils and assemblies of the people. From the Huron (who called themselves the Wendats) and the Iroquois (who called themselves the Haudenosaunee) in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America, to the republics of Ancient India, to examples of city governance in ancient Mesopotamia, these councils and assemblies were common. Classical Greece provided particularly important instances of this democratic practice, and it’s true that the Greeks gave us a language for thinking about democracy, including the word demokratia itself. But they didn’t invent the practice. If we want to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of our modern democracies, then early democratic societies from around the world provide important lessons.

The core feature of early democracy was that the people had power, even if multiparty elections (today, often thought to be a definitive feature of democracy) didn’t happen. The people, or at least some significant fraction of them, exercised this power in many different ways. In some cases, a ruler was chosen by a council or assembly, and was limited to being first among equals. In other instances, a ruler inherited their position, but faced constraints to seek consent from the people before taking actions both large and small. The alternative to early democracy was autocracy, a system where one person ruled on their own via bureaucratic subordinates whom they had recruited and remunerated. The word ‘autocracy’ is a bit of a misnomer here in that no one in this position ever truly ruled on their own, but it does signify a different way of organising political power.

Lessons from all democracies





To understand whether inequality is a problem, we need to understand the sources of inequality, views of what is fair and the implications of inequality as well as the levels of inequality. Are present levels of inequalities due to well-deserved rewards or to unfair bargaining power, regulatory failure or political capture?

Inequality encourages the rich to invest not innovation but in what Sam Bowles calls “guard labour”  – means of entrenching their privilege and power. This might involve restrictive copyright laws, ways of overseeing and controlling workers, or the corporate rent-seeking and lobbying that has led to what Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles call the “captured economy.” An especially costly form of this rent-seeking was banks’ lobbying for a “too big to fail” subsidy. This encouraged over-expansion of the banking system and the subsequent crisis, which has had a massively adverse effect upon economic growth.
Sir Angus Deaton

Eight Reasons Why Inequality Ruins the Economy





This is a good signal of emerging new approaches to therapy and wellness through both science and ancient plant medicines - a new perhaps more powerful and rapid approach to exploring consciousness and wellness.
Patients aren’t merely given a dose and left to their own devices; a new style of therapy was developed for the study which, Morgan says, uses principles from cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and relapse prevention. “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects. We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.” The patient is primed for new learning, she says, and more able to view the self from an outsider’s perspective.

This week, though, with the opening of its clinic in Bristol, Awakn Life Sciences has become the UK’s first on-the-high-street provider of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The clinical-biotech company is “researching, developing and delivering evidence-based psychedelic medicine to treat addiction and other mental health conditions”. This means it will be developing its own type of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (with a focus on MDMA to treat addiction) via experimental trials. And alongside it, delivering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

Though alcoholism is a focus, Awakn will also offer psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat depression, anxiety, eating disorders and most addictions.

‘The ketamine blew my mind’: can psychedelics cure addiction and depression?

This week sees the opening of the first UK high-street clinic offering psychedelic-assisted therapy. Could popping psilocybin be the future of mental healthcare?
In recent years, research into psychedelic-assisted mental healthcare has shed its outsider status. As far back as 2016, Robin Carhart-Harris and his team at Imperial College London published promising findings from the world’s first modern research trial investigating the impact of psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) alongside psychological support, on 19 patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). This is when a person doesn’t respond to two or more available therapies; it is particularly debilitating and, recent data shows, affects about a third of all people with depression. In the study, two doses of psilocybin (10mg and 25mg, seven days apart), plus therapy, resulted in “marked reductions in depressive symptoms” in the first five weeks, which “remained significant six months post-treatment”. This new treatment proved so promising that, in 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) awarded breakthrough therapy status to psilocybin (given only to drugs that “demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy”) as a treatment for TRD. In December 2019, a ketamine-like drug – esketamine – was licensed for use in the UK as a rapid-onset treatment for major depression: it starts working in hours, compared with weeks or months with traditional antidepressants. In April 2020, after running their own psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy study, with 24 participants who had depression, experts from John Hopkins University in the US issued a press release stating: “The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market.”

All this, and other early-stage evidence, is fuelling larger, more ambitious investigations. The London life sciences company Compass Pathways, whose research led to the FDA award, is coordinating one of the biggest psilocybin for TRD studies in the world, involving 216 patients across Europe and North America. The aim is to develop a new style of therapy that harnesses the psychedelic experience, as well as to change these substances’ classification, so they can be licensed as medicines. This wouldn’t change the legal status of MDMA or psilocybin (banned for recreational use in the UK), but it would mean treatments using these compounds could be prescribed.


This is an amazing signal - foreseen by many science fiction - cyber-punk writers - but if we think that LGBTQ is a large spectrum of ‘orientational’ identities - then we haven’t even glimpsed the spectrum in the digital environment. Also keep in mind - the growing spectrum of ‘cos-play’ fandoms (including - Medieval, Civil War, Renaissance, Wild West, Vicking,  etc enactors)
The concept that drives Miko’s stream is simple: She’s a glitchy video game character who interviews real people—specifically, famous Twitch personalities. The great strength of her act is that Miko, the character, does not know who any of these people are, and even when she does, she doesn’t give a fuck.

Some viewers have also classified Miko as part of the monolithic VTuber trend, in which real people stream as (typically anime-inspired) avatars, each with their own backstory and personality. 

She went on to explain that she suffers from severe social anxiety, but when she streams in-character, at a breakneck pace with no dead air, she’s able to exist in the moment and react to what’s happening. She can just voice whatever pops into her head, and most of the time, it’s very funny. “I just go and do it,” she said. “It’s hard to feel any negative emotions when you’re streaming.”

“I think I have, like, ban PTSD,” she told Kotaku in December. “I still don’t feel completely safe on Twitch. I’m terrified of getting an indefinite suspension for something I didn’t mean to do.”

The pipeline that turns streamers into brand-friendly productions is getting faster. That’s by design.
The responsibility is on content creators to realize that over-indexing [more than] 90% of their income on a platform that will remove them for 2+ weeks at the drop of a hat is unwise. In this day and age, no creator should be oversubscribed to one platform.”

CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First

Miko does not know it yet. She is, after all, not a fortune teller, though based on her stream—a sophisticated all-digital setup she can modify using her own skills as a coder, brought to life by a full-body mocap suit—you could be forgiven for thinking she’s from the future. On stream, she is an unflappable presence, a literal video game character whose off-kilter, on-point observations pierce straight to the heart of famous streamers’ insecurities and extract lighthearted humor. But in this moment, she is just another streamer, doing her best to capitalize on a surge of career momentum that could make or break her. She has no way of knowing it will ultimately do both.

Soon, her Twitch follower count will skyrocket, from 20,000 up to more than 500,000. Soon, she will collaborate with an endless procession of Twitch and YouTube’s biggest names: Imane “Pokimane” Anys, Hasan Piker, Asmongold, Sykkuno, Moistcr1tikal, Videogamedunkey. Soon, she will get suspended from Twitch for the third time, for questionable reasons. Soon, she will have nightmares about the prospect of a fourth suspension—one that, per Twitch’s rules, she likely will not come back from. Soon, she will hire a management firm and a development team and overhaul her entire approach to being a public figure. But she does not know any of that right now.

All she knows now is that this is her first interview with a journalist, and she hopes it goes well.

“The thing is, I burned out a long time ago,” she said with a dark chuckle. “The thing that burns me out the most is when I feel like I’m doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like, I don’t find my interactions with streamers and chat funny anymore. And so when I feel like I can’t change it because of all this other stuff I have to do, it’s mentally frustrating, and then that mentally drains me. And then I get stressed out, because it’s like ‘When am I gonna find the time to actually do the things I want to do?’ When I do get to start devving, I think that’s going to rejuvenate my soul again.”


And another very good signal of another phase transition in the digital environment - afford-dancing with the two previous signals.

Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report

Nearly 10,000 employees in the Reality Labs division
Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide.

This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook’s headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent.

Since then, Facebook has shifted its VR focus away from Oculus Rift-style tethered headsets by releasing the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are standalone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $299 Quest 2 was preordered five times as much as its predecessor, with developers seeing a boost in sales of their existing titles.


Maybe not in Canada - but many places in the world are likely to see this in their future modes of transportation

The road to electric is filled with tiny cars

Forget Tesla: Millions of people in China are embracing tiny, off-brand competitors.
In Beijing’s southwestern outskirts, past a four-lane overpass with sidewalks as wide as the streets themselves, is Zhengyang Road. It has the usual banks, small convenience stores, and noodle houses of many areas in the capital, but it is set apart by a row of about a dozen shops all selling the same thing — tiny electric cars. The cars look, variously, like small Range Rovers, golf carts, trolley cars, or rickshaws with sheet-iron sides, and they are slow. Their fundamental attraction is their price — between $600 and $2,500 — and that drivers can charge them the same way they would a cell phone. They also come with the perks of being loosely regulated. These low-speed electric cars, nicknamed “elderly transport vehicles,” have an enormous market, made up mostly of people who earn very little. And in China, there are a lot of them — more than 40% of the population, or some 600 million people, make around $150 per month.


Here’s a very good signal on the current state of AI and current systems of vision.
The brain processes images using a huge number of connections at low power. Computers have fewer connections but loads more power. Computer vision models, historically, have looked at single images where a static picture is presented at a uniform resolution. Traditional AI vision systems try to process the entirety of that uniform image. 
That’s completely different from what people do. For humans, vision is really a sampling process, where the eye makes real time decisions around what information in the field of vision is going to be further deciphered. 

Radical Reads: Exclusive Q&A with Geoffrey Hinton – A big idea for solving vision

AI pioneer, Vector Institute Chief Scientific Advisor and Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton published a paper last week on how recent advances in deep learning might be combined to build an AI system that better reflects how human vision works. Hinton’s system is called “GLOM” and in this exclusive Q&A with Radical partner Aaron Brindle, Geoffrey explains how it works, its implications for everything from self-driving cars to natural language processing, and why he landed on the term (or acronym?) GLOM.


A definite signal - although still a weak one on the future of quantum computing.

Programmable optical quantum computer arrives late, steals the show

New optical quantum computer overcomes previous limits, looks like a winner.
There is no question that quantum computing has come a long way in 20 years. Two decades ago, optical quantum technology looked like the way forward. Storing information in a photon's quantum states (as an optical qubit) was easy. Manipulating those states with standard optical elements was also easy, and measuring the outcome was relatively trivial. Quantum computing was just a new application of existing quantum experiments, and those experiments had shown the ease of use of the systems and gave optical technologies the early advantage.

 what has changed to suddenly make optical quantum computers viable? The last decade has seen a number of developments. One is the appearance of detectors that can resolve the number of photons they receive. All the original work relied on single-photon detectors, which could detect light/not light. It was up to you to ensure that what you were detecting was a single photon and not a whole stream of them.

By using photon-number-resolving detectors, scientists are no longer limited to states encoded in a single photon. Now, they can make use of states that make use of the photon number. In other words, a single qubit can be in a superposition state of containing a different number of photons zero, one, two and so on, up to some maximum number. Hence, fewer qubits can be used for a computation.


One real signal of an emerging metabolic economy.

Recycled plastic bricks stronger than concrete

A Kenyan entrepreneur has taken discarded plastic and turned it into bricks that can  hold twice the weight of concrete blocks.
 The same piece of plastic can only be recycled around two or three times before it becomes unrecyclable. So why don’t we recycle this plastic into something that’ll be useful for much longer?

When entrepreneur Nzambi Matee decided to start a social enterprise, Gjenge Makers, she was thinking of solutions to the plastic pollution problem in the West African country. The aim was to address the need for sustainable and affordable alternative construction materials.

Before creating her startup, Nzambi majored in material science and worked as an engineer in Kenya’s oil industry, but in 2017 she quit her job to start creating textured brick pavers through recycling plastic waste. She understood which plastics would bind better together and then created the machinery that would allow her to mass produce them.


This is a good signal of how much there remains to be known about fundamental properties of matter, passive matter and active matter - and that other basic laws of nature have yet to be uncovered.
In this swirlonic state, the particles displayed bizarre behavior. For example, they violated Newton's second law: When a force was applied to them, they did not accelerate.
"[They] just move with a constant velocity, which is absolutely surprising," Brilliantov said.

Meet the swirlon, a new kind of matter that bends the laws of physics

Researchers discover a new state of active matter.
Fish school, insects swarm and birds fly in murmurations. Now, new research finds that on the most basic level, this kind of group behavior forms a new kind of active matter, called a swirlonic state. 

Physical laws such as Newton's second law of motion — which states that as a force applied to an object increases, its acceleration increases, and that as the object's mass increases, its acceleration decreases — apply to passive, nonliving matter, ranging from atoms to planets. But much of the matter in the world is active matter and moves under its own, self-directed, force, said Nikolai Brilliantov, a mathematician at Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology in Russia and the University of Leicester in England. Living things as diverse as bacteria, birds and humans can interact with the forces upon them. There are examples of non-living active matter, too. Nanoparticles known as "Janus particles," are made up of two sides with different chemical properties. The interactions between the two sides create self-propelled movement.


A weak signal of the possibilities of a first contact?
This study shows that S-type asteroids, where most of Earth's meteorites come from, such as Itokawa, contain the raw ingredients of life. The analysis of this asteroid changes traditional views on the origin of life on Earth which have previously heavily focused on C-type carbon-rich asteroids.

Organic materials essential for life on Earth are found for the first time on the surface of an asteroid

New research from Royal Holloway, has found water and organic matter on the surface of an asteroid sample returned from the inner Solar System. This is the first time that organic materials, which could have provided chemical precursors for the origin of life on Earth, have been found on an asteroid.

The single grain sample was returned to Earth from asteroid Itokawa by JAXA's first Hayabusa mission in 2010. The sample shows that water and organic matter that originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time.

The research paper suggests that Itokawa has been constantly evolving over billions of years by incorporating water and organic materials from foreign extra-terrestrial material, just like the Earth.


This is an interesting signal - for entertainment and surveillance - imagine everyone with three of these personal drones. 

Behind the scenes of "Right up our Alley" bowling alley drone video

This video appeared in a small news site and was not posted on YouTube.
It probably deserves some wider exposure.


I have never shared a cartoon - but this seemed so appropriate for our times.



And here’s an visual to back up the perennial advice about passwords




#micropoem 



Covid-space-time - 
the day was long -
and now it's gone -
with barely a blink of an eye -


All knowledge is partial -
there is too much to know -
the horizons of emerging knowables -
expand exponentially -
and afford-dancing -
unfinitely manifolding -
superposition -

mhm - 
one way to imagine -how an individual -
evolves into an ecology of Dividuals - 

 

a hub of partial selfves -
in an ecology of networks -

 

Someone - 
reaching top 1% performer - 
as 10 different characters -
in 10 different MMORGs 

Is the fear of -
cancel culture - 
account suspension -  
the fear of being banished -
from the digital environment - 
 
retrieving the very same fear -
of banishment-from-group -
that we lived -
as hunter-gatherers?