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:
Time, like memory, is fickle: days wrap back on themselves
Observing nature in your backyard is not dull but radically significant
Articles:
Stanford study into “Zoom Fatigue” explains why video chats are so tiring
Google is done with cookies, but that doesn’t mean it’s done tracking you
Bitcoin As A Meme And A Future
Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas
The future of the food supply chain lives on a rooftop in Montreal
Fungal microbiome: Whether mice get fatter or thinner depends on the fungi that live in their gut
'Like a horror movie': Caterpillar silences tomato's cry for help, scientists find
A new study reveals that quantum physics can cause mutations in our DNA
World's largest hydrogen "green steel" plant to open in Sweden by 2024
While structurally fickle, this is how memory operates: people circle in and out, objects serve minor, then major roles; there are acts and reprises and second chances. The experience of time is hardly ever chronological.
In illness especially, time can take on new forms. ‘It was no longer linear,’ writes Julavits. ‘I did not see time ahead of me. I experienced time on top of me. I experienced time underneath me. Time became a hollow, vertical enclosure.’
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrung meaning from time. Each day is so like the former. April disappeared entirely; Thanksgiving feels as close, or faraway, as last June. I no longer can keep track of the dates; time has become a pool of standing water.
what the Greeks termed Kairos, designating the correct or auspicious moment (as opposed to Chronos, which refers to sequential time, or Aion, which denotes the ages or cyclical time) feels very out of reach. Even so, there is no singular clock, no one ‘time organ’, as the psychologist Robert Ornstein put it, to which we all adhere. Instead, our temporal perspectives are cultural
Time is ruled entirely by one’s own sense of being, by hunger and humiliation, by lovesickness and dread and delight. The metrics cannot be severed from the rhythms of a life.
Time, like memory, is fickle: days wrap back on themselves
The web of life is shifting and reweaving in complex ways, in some cases showing resilience and adaptability, in others precarious vulnerability. It’s more important than ever to understand and watch our local natural world closely for augurs of the changes to come. And this can be done only by meticulous observation by those people, often amateurs rather than professionals, with the patience and passion to learn to read and understand nature’s secret codes.
Addressing the profound challenge of global environmental change is complex and multifaceted. But one certainty is the need for a change of world view, the fostering of humility towards the natural world and its shared community of beings. Such humility and appreciation are made possible by acute observation, empathy and delight in the mysteries and quirks of other species,
Observing nature in your backyard is not dull but radically significant
virtue ethics is committed to the idea that moral character lies at the heart of ethics; and that, paradoxically, it is primarily by working on our own character that we become able to treat others well. Moral character is a capacious concept. It relies not on fixed rules of wrong and right action, but rather on practising virtuous behaviours in day-to-day life—and the psychological significance of role models upon behaviour and beliefs. Every action, no matter how small, is potentially a precedent.
Similarly, inactions and happenstance are of great significance. To be disadvantaged, abused, or unfortunate is to be confronted by obstacles to thriving that it may prove impossible to overcome. In this sense, civic virtues such as respect for justice, fairness, and liberty—and the communal cultivation of these—can be of greater weight than purely personal achievements.
Perhaps above all, virtue ethics is determinedly modest in its ambitions. It sees thriving and goodness alike as lifelong journeys with no final destination, and even the best of us as only too human.
It’s useful at this point to consider a concrete example of virtue in practice when it comes to tech; and, in particular, what it means to align the development and deployment of a technology with the growth, freedom, and empowerment of those affected by it.
a great gift of virtue ethics is that it requires us to address precisely this context through the lens of each life’s potentials and dignity: that we acknowledge the explicitly ethical interdependencies of a society’s norms, inclusions, exclusions, and the weighty individual and collective demands made of us by hopes of growth and thriving
Indeed, perhaps the weightiest of all these demands is that we acknowledge the depths of our fallibility, vulnerability, and dependency, both upon one another and upon the systems surrounding us.
this recognition of mutual dependency is not couched in terms of fear or rejection. To be human is to be born into utter helplessness, in circumstances beyond our choosing. It is to grow and change, constrained by these circumstances and biological inheritance. It is to achieve some measure of independence, for a time, in the context of society’s vast networks of exchange and competition. And it is to seek not only survival but also—so long as the body’s basic needs are met—some form of flourishing or contentment. There is no final victory, no guarantee of success, and no infallible guidance. There is only the contingent business of trying, together, to live and to know ourselves a little better.
Finding Virtue in the Virtual
An interesting signal about the potential impacts on our sense of mirrored self while relating within the digital environment.
Stanford study into “Zoom Fatigue” explains why video chats are so tiring
A new study from Stanford University communications expert Jeremy Bailenson is investigating the very modern phenomenon of "Zoom Fatigue." Bailenson suggests there are four key factors that make videoconferencing so uniquely tiring, and he recommends some simple solutions to reduce exhaustion.
When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in early 2020 and people shifted to living their lives from home, videoconferencing quickly became a primary mode of communication, for everything from seeing your doctor to taking a college class. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of people were spending most of their day sitting in front of a screen, watching an array of faces staring back at them, and the term "Zoom fatigue" soon emerged.
People were reporting a unique kind of exhaustion at the end of whole days of videoconferencing, which seemed counter-intuitive. After all, we could spend our entire day in the comfort of our own home instead of trekking around town from meeting to meeting. Why were we seemingly more exhausted after six or eight hours of videoconferencing compared to a regular long day of in-person interactions?
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, was not surprised. He had spent more than two decades studying the ways virtual communication affects individuals, and he quickly penned an editorial suggesting the unique fatigue that accompanies a day of videoconferencing could be due to a kind of non-verbal-cue overload that occurs when one substitutes virtual platforms for in-person interactions.
This is a weak signal of the ongoing turbulence around enclosing the web and establishing narratives as business models - perhaps.
Google is done with cookies, but that doesn’t mean it’s done tracking you
A third-party cookie ban won’t hurt the search giant’s healthy first-party data ad business.
Google announced on Wednesday that third-party cookies are over — at least, as far as its ad networks and Chrome browser are concerned. This represents a significant change for the ad business and seems to be a step forward for privacy, but it’s also a limited one. It doesn’t mean that Google will stop collecting your data, and it doesn’t mean the company will stop using your data to target ads.
What Google will stop doing is selling web ads targeted to individual users’ browsing habits, and its Chrome browser will no longer allow cookies that collect that data. Ad companies that rely on cookies will have to find another way to target users; Google thinks it already has. Meanwhile, Google will still track and target users on mobile devices, and it will still target ads to users based on their behavior on its own platforms, which make up the majority of its revenue and won’t be affected by the change. In other words, while the announcement will have huge implications for the digital ad industry, it probably won’t for Google itself.
Google has been building up to this for some time. The company revealed its “Privacy Sandbox” in August 2019, an initiative to personalize (or target) web ads while still preserving user privacy. In January 2020, Google announced that it hoped to block third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by 2022 — a move that other browsers, like Safari and Firefox, made years ago. Google has planned to replace third-party cookies with technology developed through Privacy Sandbox.
And speaking about business models this is a fascinating perspective of Bitcoin - as a question of a way of valuing what particular value?
“If all money is a bet on the future, it is also a summoning of a future.”
Bitcoin As A Meme And A Future
Memes perform powerful magic that turns absurdity and cynicism into the kind of true belief that can bend reality.
I study money as a media technology, and I have been writing about Bitcoin for almost as long as it has existed. But I am not a financial advisor, and I especially avoid giving advice about cryptocurrency. So when someone asks the Bitcoin Question (it’s usually about Bitcoin specifically), I respond by asking why the person wants to buy it — what they’re hoping to achieve.
Often, they’re just looking for my approval to engage in a little speculation. They had heard about one of Bitcoin’s many rallies and want to know if it would really be so crazy to get in on the action. I tell them there are a lot of scams out there, and no one ever got rich buying anything at the top of the market. So maybe wait out this bubble and prepare to profit off the next one. Maybe spend some time learning about the landscape: what to buy, how much, when, how to secure it and when to sell it.
Most people who ask me the Bitcoin Question admit that they weren’t imagining any particular use for the currency. They don’t predict, for example, that the banking system is going to collapse, leaving only Bitcoin. Nor do they really think that the value of the U.S. dollar will crash so radically and permanently that Bitcoin becomes a more stable asset. But still, they ask, butstill?
While there is now a generation that has been born into and grown up with the Internet - the digital environment is still in its infancy. Hovering on the horizons are new computational paradigms and ways of connecting from entanglement to a full spectrum of light.
Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small enough to be placed on computer chips.
The new work, reported in a paper published Thursday, Feb. 25, in the journal Nature Physics, throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source. A common example of multiplexing is the transmission of multiple telephone calls over a single wire, but there had been fundamental limits to the number of coherent twisted lightwaves that could be directly multiplexed.
"It's the first time that lasers producing twisted light have been directly multiplexed," said study principal investigator Boubacar Kanté, the Chenming Hu Associate Professor at UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "We've been experiencing an explosion of data in our world, and the communication channels we have now will soon be insufficient for what we need. The technology we are reporting overcomes current data capacity limits through a characteristic of light called the orbital angular momentum. It is a game-changer with applications in biological imaging, quantum cryptography, high-capacity communications and sensors."
This is definitely a good signal of the emergence of new food producing paradigms that are - closer than many think.
rooftop greenhouses that bring agriculture into cities. No pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides. Composting their green waste. Selling direct-to-consumer the same day the food is harvested. Capturing and reusing rainwater. Reusable packaging.
The future of the food supply chain lives on a rooftop in Montreal
The world’s biggest commercial rooftop greenhouse sits atop a former Sears warehouse in a semi-industrial northwestern quarter of Montreal. Early every morning, staff pick fresh vegetables, then bring them downstairs, where they get packed into heavy-duty plastic totes along with the rest of the day’s grocery orders.
Tablets loaded with custom pick-and-pack software tell them where to put what: This basket has lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumbers, plus some chicken, eggs, and milk. The next one has eggplant, cashew Parmesan, tomato sauce, fresh pasta, and vegan ground round crumble. Whatever Lufa doesn’t grow in its four greenhouses comes from local farms and producers, mostly from within 100 miles.
This is a modern foodie’s dream: a tech-forward online shop full of locally grown, pesticide-free, ethically-sourced products at reasonable price points, delivered once a week to either your doorstep or a local pickup point in your neighborhood.
It seems that our microbiome includes fungi as well as bacteria - here’s a small signal of progress in understanding our personal ecologies.
While many of the interactions between humans and their gut fungi are likely beneficial, this may not always be the case. For example, fungi may play a role in irritable bowel syndrome and increase the risk of developing pancreatic cancer.
Not only could the presence or absence of certain fungi have direct effects on health, fungal interaction with bacteria is also likely very important.
Fungal microbiome: Whether mice get fatter or thinner depends on the fungi that live in their gut
Mice with certain communities of fungi living in their gut gained more weight when eating processed food than mice whose gut microbiomes hosted different communities of fungi, according to our study published March 5 in the journal Communications Biology.
Microbiomes are communities of microorganisms. In this study, we explored whether the fungal members of the gut microbiome – called the mycobiome – changed their host’s metabolic reaction to processed food. To do this, we obtained genetically identical mice from four different companies – each with different fungal microbiomes – and then fed the mice either standard mouse food or processed food resembling the typical American diet. After six weeks, we measured their body fat as well as genes and hormones involved in metabolism.
We specifically looked at the relationship between the fungal microbiome and processed foods – foods that contain refined sugars, monounsaturated fats and white flour, for example – because these foods are linked to unhealthy weight gain in humans. Eating processed food made most mice fatter, but how much weight and how their metabolism changed varied between mice with different microbiomes. After measuring the microbiomes of each mouse, we used machine learning to figure out which fungi had the strongest influence on metabolism.
And fungi may play other important roles.
Living among mushrooms
Can mushrooms be the platform we build the future on? We’ve used mushrooms as food for thousands of years, but what happens if we look at this organism as a material?
Tired of the amount of plastic piling up around the planet as well as the treatment of farm animals, New York-based engineer Eben Bayer began growing mycelium in Central Vermont in the noughties – an idea that led to the foundation of Ecovative Design in 2007: “I use biology to solve important environmental challenges by growing safe and healthy new materials as well envisioning creative ways to use natural technology at industrial scales,” he explains.
The startup takes mycelium (the root structure of mushrooms) and creates incredible, 100% compostable alternatives to plastics, leather, styrofoam packaging, meat and more. Rather than being reliant on petroleum, these products use local feedstock from crop waste such as seed husks and woody biomass, which means the material can be grown anywhere.
Ecovative has currently developed three platforms around it: MycoFlex in which flexible mycelium provides sustainable alternatives to everything from plastics to leather; MycoComposite uses mycelium serves as biodegradable packing material, and Atlast Food Co with mycelium serving as ‘edible scaffolding’ for meat replacement.
I love this signal of our growing understanding of communications throughout all manner of living things - how mind and nature are necessarily united and paradoxically in competition within an ecology.
'Like a horror movie': Caterpillar silences tomato's cry for help, scientists find
Scientists found that a caterpillar called the tomato fruit worm not only chomps on tomatoes and their leaves, but also deposits enzyme-laden saliva on the plant, interfering with its ability to cry for help.
If it all sounds a bit improbable, starting with the concept of plants crying for help, scientists also scoffed at that idea when it was first proposed a few decades ago. But it has been shown time and time again that when under attack, plants can emit chemical distress signals, causing their peers to mount some sort of defense. A classic example is the smell of a freshly mown lawn, which prompts the release of protective compounds in nearby blades of grass that have yet to be cut.
In some cases, plant distress signals can even summon help from other species. That's what happens with the tomato. When caterpillars nibble on the plant's leaves, the leaf pores release volatile chemicals that are detected by a type of parasite: a wasp that lays eggs inside caterpillars. (Not to overwork the horror-movie analogy, but as with the hapless astronauts in the "Aliens" franchise, it doesn't end well for the caterpillar.)
This is a small signal of the convergence of the biological and the world of quantum - including computational paradigms - quantum physics and biology.
A new study reveals that quantum physics can cause mutations in our DNA
Quantum biology is an emerging field of science, established in the 1920s, which looks at whether the subatomic world of quantum mechanics plays a role in living cells. Quantum mechanics is an interdisciplinary field by nature, bringing together nuclear physicists, biochemists and molecular biologists.
In a research paper published by the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics, a team from Surrey's Leverhulme Quantum Biology Doctoral Training Centre used state-of-the-art computer simulations and quantum mechanical methods to determine the role proton tunneling, a purely quantum phenomenon, plays in spontaneous mutations inside DNA.
Proton tunneling involves the spontaneous disappearance of a proton from one location and the same proton's re-appearance nearby.
A signal of the hydrogen economy in steel making.
World's largest hydrogen "green steel" plant to open in Sweden by 2024
In 2020, the world produced about 1,864 million tons of steel, and since some 75 percent of the energy used in steelmaking comes from coal, each of those tons sent about 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The world can't get by without this ubiquitous metal at this point, but steel production is responsible for between 7-8 percent of global carbon emissions every year. This makes it a key target for decarbonization efforts, and it's one of the key areas where hydrogen is expected to be a cost-competitive alternative within a decade.
In typical production, blast or electric arc furnaces combine iron ore and limestone with coke (coal that's been baked at high temperatures to remove impurities) to create steel. But that coke reductant can be replaced with hydrogen, resulting in a process that emits nothing but water, and hydrogen can also be used to power the arc furnaces, giving you a steel production pipeline that's totally emissions-free.
Every major steel producer in the world is considering something similar to bring its emissions down, and there are plenty of incentives for downstream customers like automakers to get on board with green steel as it becomes available. A new development in Northern Sweden, headed up by the current CEO of Scania, aims to get some volume into the market early.
#micropoem
mhm -
it’s so sad -
to live without connecting -
with the differences -
in our common-ness -
such a small colurture spectrum -
in my his-story -
we don’t see -
what we don’t see -
stantive -
[mhm - ex-ample like it used to be ample?] -
mhm - sample --
that was such a stantive experience -
shouldn’t that be better than -
sub-stantive experience? -
mhm - less-than-stantive -
is of credible amount? -
i do like to grow things -
not a lot of things -
but stuff i can make food with -
it is amazing -
how easy it is to grow more than you can eat -
mhm -
surplus -
it drives social chemistry -
as the best way to create -
and handle diversities of surplus -
mhm -
intermittent fasting -
it's not so much the non-eating -
it’s sort of seeing -all the food i have -
not being eaten-used -
sigh -
the eternal privilege -
a choice -
to waste or waist food -
more and more -
an amazing wonder-meant -
as i listen to - as i learn to -
hear the -
meanings that abound -
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