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:
Looking at portraits with an eye to evolutionary psychology
Recognising the rhythm in addiction offers new ways to escape it
Yoon Ha Lee -Conservation of Shadows
Articles:
Dominant tech companies make their products incompatible deliberately
Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations
DNA robots designed in minutes instead of days
A new technique could make some plastic trash compostable at home
A more efficient, safer alternative to sourcing copper via bacteria
'Tantalizing' results of 2 experiments defy physics rulebook
‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world
What inspired our research was a general zoological observation of no obvious relevance to art history, let alone to portrait painting. Most animals are bilaterians: they have a right and a left side, and a front and a back. This body plan is strongly correlated with the direction in which they typically move: forward. Many animals including humans perceive better and pay more attention to what’s in front of them. Hence, if you’re watching another human or a nonhuman animal and you want to understand their thoughts and predict their actions, it makes sense to attend to what might be happening in front of them rather than behind them. Even an infant spontaneously perceives humans and nonhuman animals as having a front and a back, and relies on this to anticipate what they might do next, as Hernik demonstrated in an earlier study, co-authored with the clinical psychologist Pasco Fearon and the cognitive scientist Gergely Csibra.
With Miton and Hernik, we speculated that this adaptive disposition to pay particular attention to what agents have in front of them might subtly influence one type of cultural production, namely profile portraits. We predicted that, in painting such portraits, artists would have a ‘forward bias’, that is, a tendency to leave more space in front of the sitters than behind them.
Looking at portraits with an eye to evolutionary psychology
what we observed ... in the US, the UK and France was that addiction is a cyclical rhythm, a strict and dominant hamster-wheel imposed on them by a substance. This is what we call addiction time: a cyclical temporality that drugs impose on the person who takes them, catching them in a perpetual cycle. It implies quite different ways of escaping addiction, compared with those put forward by the prevailing medical model.
viewing addiction as something that’s cyclical not only assumes a different kind of person taking the drugs – it also suggests other treatment options. Addiction time, as we conceive it, cuts you ‘out of time’; it involves a loss of a sense of time and a replacement of time, as the anthropologist Kelly Knight and other scholars have documented. People … who consume crack and inject heroin (or prescription opioids and fentanyl) are often ‘caught’ in a cyclical, all-encompassing rhythm. They’re forced – by their addiction – to focus on the procurement and consumption of the drug in the present.
Recognising the rhythm in addiction offers new ways to escape it
Nothing stays settled, so of course a person with one year of experience and one with fifteen years of experience can both be confused. Things are so often only understood by those who are well-positioned in the middle of the current wave of thought. If you’re before the sweet spot in the wave, your inexperience means you know nothing. If you are after, you will know lots of things that aren’t applicable to that particular way of doing things.
One argument says that continual change in methodology is rigorous and healthy. I agree. Keeping things in play helps us to more easily fix what’s wrong. It’d be terrible if nothing could ever change. But I also agree with the other argument: people only have so much patience. How many laps around the cycle can a person run? I’m on lap five now, and I can tell you that it is exhausting to engage with rehashed ideas from the past without feeling a tiny amount of prejudice against them.
In one way, it is easier to be inexperienced: you don’t have to learn what is no longer relevant. Experience, on the other hand, creates two distinct struggles: the first is to identify and unlearn what is no longer necessary (that’s work, too). The second is to remain open-minded, patient, and willing to engage with what’s new, even if it resembles a new take on something you decided against a long time ago.
Everything Easy is Hard Again
There is no such thing as conservation of shadows.
When light destroys shadows, darkness does not gain in density elsewhere.
When shadows steal over earth and across the sky, darkness is not diluted .
Yoon Ha Lee -Conservation of Shadows
A good signal of the turbulence in the emergence of a new economic paradigm.
Economics in Nouns and Verbs
Standard economic theory uses mathematics as its main means of understanding, and this brings clarity of reasoning and logical power. But there is a drawback: algebraic mathematics restricts economic modeling to what can be expressed only in quantitative nouns, and this forces theory to leave out matters to do with process, formation, adjustment, creation and nonequilibrium. For these we need a different means of understanding, one that allows verbs as well as nouns. Algorithmic expression is such a means. It allows verbs (processes) as well as nouns (objects and quantities). It allows fuller description in economics, and can include heterogeneity of agents, actions as well as objects, and realistic models of behavior in ill-defined situations. The world that algorithms reveal is action-based as well as object-based, organic, possibly ever-changing, and not fully knowable. But it is strangely and wonderfully alive.
Surely we can do better - we could pass protective laws to ensure adversarial interoperability.
Interoperability is one of the basic principles on which the internet was originally built. By adopting open technical standards, people and companies around the world could communicate and exchange services and content in simple and effective ways. Breaking down the internet into ‘walled gardens’ controlled by a single gatekeeper is the dream of every aspiring monopolist; but it undoes the very principle that allowed the internet to thrive and foster growth and development for all its participants.
Dominant tech companies make their products incompatible deliberately
Imagine buying a new dining table from IKEA and although it’s a great table, it can only be used with IKEA-made chairs. For security reasons, the furniture maker tells you, the table is incompatible with chairs from third party vendors, sorry. Sounds ridiculous? Welcome to today’s online platform economy.
Many of the largest tech companies deliberately make their products incompatible with others. The technical term for products that are compatible with those from other vendors is ‘interoperability’. Digital interoperability is a technical mechanism for computing systems to work together, even if they are from competing firms. Well-known examples of interoperable technology are email and telephone services. You can send an email or call anyone else with an email account or phone, regardless of the service provider, app or device you use.
Why can corporations control this? Big tech companies can break interoperability and get away with it because they are too big to care. Facebook, WhatsApp, Youtube, and others have so many users that they benefit from holding them as digital hostages by making any interaction with people on other services technically impossible.
The result: People sign up to those closed networks not because they are the best but because people have to if they wish to be in touch with everyone else. In economics this is called a ‘network effect’ and overcoming network effects by breaking people free from the hostage situation is incredibly difficult without effective legislation. What kind of legislation is needed?
This is a good signal related to better faster AI in the near future.
we now have deep neural networks that can learn how to approximate not just functions, but “operators” that map functions to functions. And they seem to do so without suffering from the “curse of dimensionality,” a problem that can plague neural networks and other computer algorithms that learn from data.
Latest Neural Nets Solve World’s Hardest Equations Faster Than Ever Before
Two new approaches allow deep neural networks to solve entire families of partial differential equations, making it easier to model complicated systems and to do so orders of magnitude faster.
Now researchers have built new kinds of artificial neural networks that can approximate solutions to partial differential equations orders of magnitude faster than traditional PDE solvers. And once trained, the new neural nets can solve not just a single PDE but an entire family of them without retraining.
To achieve these results, the scientists are taking deep neural networks — the modern face of artificial intelligence — into new territory. Normally, neural nets map, or convert data, from one finite-dimensional space (say, the pixel values of images) to another finite-dimensional space (say, the numbers that classify the images, like 1 for cat and 2 for dog). But the new deep nets do something dramatically different. They “map between an infinite-dimensional space and an infinite-dimensional space,” said the mathematician Siddhartha Mishra of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, who didn’t design the deep nets but has been analyzing them mathematically.
Solving complex PDEs numerically can take months on supercomputers. And if you change the initial or boundary conditions or the geometry of the system being studied (such as the wing design), you’ll have to start over. Also, the smaller the increments you use — or the finer the mesh, as the researchers say — the higher the resolution of the model, and the longer it takes to solve numerically.
This is a fascinating signal of understanding the brain-mind condition - with possible implications of a sensorium that embodies an extended mind. What is more interesting is anticipating our AI-ssistants who will help interface with a data sensorium for an exponentially larger memory mansion.
sensory data was transformed into a memory through a morphing of the neuronal firing patterns. “The information changes because it needs to be protected,”
This use of orthogonal coding to separate and protect information in the brain has been seen before. For instance, when monkeys are preparing to move, neural activity in their motor cortex represents the potential movement but does so orthogonally to avoid interfering with signals driving actual commands to the muscles.
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations
Research in mice shows that neural representations of sensory information get rotated 90 degrees to transform them into memories. In this orthogonal arrangement, the memories and sensations do not interfere with one another.
During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory.
But to accomplish this, the brain has to keep the two distinct; otherwise, incoming data streams could interfere with representations of previous stimuli and cause us to overwrite or misinterpret important contextual information. Compounding that challenge, a body of research hints that the brain does not neatly partition short-term memory function exclusively into higher cognitive areas like the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the sensory regions and other lower cortical centers that detect and represent experiences may also encode and store memories of them. And yet those memories can’t be allowed to intrude on our perception of the present, or to be randomly rewritten by new experiences.
Another potentially very important signal in the future of DNA domestication.
"The big story here is we now have a simple tool that can silence the vast majority of genes," says Weissman, who is also a professor of biology at MIT and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "We can do this for multiple genes at the same time without any DNA damage, with great deal of homogeneity, and in a way that can be reversed. It's a great tool for controlling gene expression."
New, reversible CRISPR method can control gene expression while leaving underlying DNA sequence unchanged
Over the past decade, the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system has revolutionized genetic engineering, allowing scientists to make targeted changes to organisms' DNA. While the system could potentially be useful in treating a variety of diseases, CRISPR-Cas9 editing involves cutting DNA strands, leading to permanent changes to the cell's genetic material.
Now, in a paper published online in Cell, researchers describe a new gene editing technology called CRISPRoff that allows researchers to control gene expression with high specificity while leaving the sequence of the DNA unchanged. Designed by Whitehead Institute Member Jonathan Weissman, University of California San Francisco assistant professor Luke Gilbert, Weissman lab postdoc James Nuñez and collaborators, the method is stable enough to be inherited through hundreds of cell divisions, and is also fully reversible.
A great small signal of the design of domesticated DNA tools
"Previously, we could build devices with up to about six individual components and connect them with joints and hinges and try to make them execute complex motions, With this software, it is not hard to make robots or other devices with upwards of 20 components that are much easier to control. It is a huge step in our ability to design nanodevices that can perform the complex actions that we want them to do."
DNA robots designed in minutes instead of days
Someday, scientists believe, tiny DNA-based robots and other nanodevices will deliver medicine inside our bodies, detect the presence of deadly pathogens, and help manufacture increasingly smaller electronics.
Researchers took a big step toward that future by developing a new tool that can design much more complex DNA robots and nanodevices than were ever possible before in a fraction of the time.
In a paper published today in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from The Ohio State University—led by former engineering doctoral student Chao-Min Huang—unveiled new software they call MagicDNA.
The software helps researchers design ways to take tiny strands of DNA and combine them into complex structures with parts like rotors and hinges that can move and complete a variety of tasks, including drug delivery.
A good signal of an emerging metabolic economy - where we can ban landfill and expect all products to be fully reclaimable, modular, or decomposed into useful molecules.
A new technique could make some plastic trash compostable at home
Embedding enzymes in the material causes it to rapidly break down without creating microplastics
With moderate heat, enzyme-laced films of the plastic disintegrated in standard compost or plain tap water within days to weeks, Ting Xu and her colleagues report April 21 in Nature.
“Biodegradability does not equal compostability,” says Xu, a polymer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She often finds bits of biodegradable plastic in the compost she picks up for her parents’ garden. Most biodegradable plastics go to landfills, where the conditions aren’t right for them to break down, so they degrade no faster than normal plastics.
Embedding polymer-chomping enzymes in biodegradable plastic should accelerate decomposition. But that process often inadvertently forms potentially harmful microplastics, which are showing up in ecosystems across the globe. The enzymes clump together and randomly snip plastics’ molecular chains, leading to an incomplete breakdown. “It’s worse than if you don’t degrade them in the first place,” Xu says.
Her team added individual enzymes into two biodegradable plastics, including polylactic acid, commonly used in food packaging. They inserted the enzymes along with another ingredient, a degradable additive Xu previously developed, which ensured the enzymes didn’t clump together and didn’t fall apart. The solitary enzymes grabbed the ends of the plastics’ molecular chains and ate as though they were slurping spaghetti, severing every chain link and preventing microplastic formation.
A great signal on how domesticating DNA can enable the new materials and new ways to harvest matter.
"The idea of having bacteria in mines is not new, but the unanswered question was: what are they doing in the mines?" Robles said. "By putting the bacteria inside an electronic microscope, we were able to figure out the physics and analyze it. We found out the bacteria were isolating single atom copper. In terms of chemistry, this is extremely difficult to derive. Typically, harsh chemicals are used in order to produce single atoms of any element. This bacterium is creating it naturally that is very impressive."
A more efficient, safer alternative to sourcing copper via bacteria
Copper remains one of the single most ubiquitous metals in everyday life. As a conductor of heat and electricity, it is utilized in wires, roofing and plumbing, as well as a catalyst for petrochemical plants, solar and electrical conductors and for a wide range of energy related applications. Subsequently, any method to harvest more of the valuable commodity proves a useful endeavor.
Debora Rodrigues, Ezekiel Cullen Professor of Engineering at the University of Houston Cullen College of Engineering, in collaboration with Francisco C. Robles Hernandez, professor at the UH College of Technology and Ellen Aquino Perpetuo, professor at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil offered conclusive research for understanding how bacteria found in copper mines convert toxic copper ions to stable single-atom copper.
In their co-authored paper, "Copper Mining Bacteria: Converting toxic copper ions into a stable single atom copper," their research demonstrates how copper-resistant bacterium from a copper mine in Brazil convert copper sulfate ions into zero-valent metallic copper.
Fascinating signals related to what’s the matter of the universe.
If confirmed, the U.S. results would be the biggest finding in the bizarre world of subatomic particles in nearly 10 years, since the discovery of the Higgs boson,
"The secrets don't just live in matter. They live in something that seems to fill in all of space and time. These are quantum fields," Kaplan said. "We're putting energy into the vacuum and seeing what comes out."
'Tantalizing' results of 2 experiments defy physics rulebook
Preliminary results from two experiments suggest something could be wrong with the basic way physicists think the universe works, a prospect that has the field of particle physics both baffled and thrilled.
Tiny particles called muons aren't quite doing what is expected of them in two different long-running experiments in the United States and Europe. The confounding results—if proven right—reveal major problems with the rulebook physicists use to describe and understand how the universe works at the subatomic level.
"We think we might be swimming in a sea of background particles all the time that just haven't been directly discovered," Fermilab experiment co-chief scientist Chris Polly said in a press conference. "There might be monsters we haven't yet imagined that are emerging from the vacuum interacting with our muons and this gives us a window into seeing them."
The rulebook, called the Standard Model, was developed about 50 years ago. Experiments performed over decades affirmed over and again that its descriptions of the particles and the forces that make up and govern the universe were pretty much on the mark. Until now.
A strong signal of the accelerating phase transition in global energy geopolitics.
‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world
Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen – and no one saw it coming
In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency (IEA) made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.
Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organisation underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.
“I see it as the limits of modelling. Most energy system models are, or were, set up to model minor changes to an energy system that is run on fossil fuel or nuclear. Every time you double producing capacity, you reduce the cost of PV solar by 28%.
“We’ve got to the point where solar is the cheapest source of energy in the world in most places. This means we’ve been trying to model a situation where the grid looks totally different today.”
#micropoem
There is something in our dreams -
a distance -
between the geology of our life -
and the wishes -
from the well of emptiness -
#micropoem
They say it’s a dog eat dog world -
but don’t they know that dogs are pack animals -
they survive in groups -
I’m doing ok -
covid space-time -
being a night owl -
minding time with family -
minding stuff to do -
minding my own mind -
mhm -
sometimes the best we can do -
is have a shared -
interestedness -
Parenting is wayfinding -
the map is Not only NOT the territory -
but the maps changes -
in a different way than -
the territory does -
Training judgement -
secret to life! -
you Must pay attention -
to how the sausage of judgment -
is made -
all judgments require boundaries -
that we assume [as judgments] -
judgements improve with training -
only as long as assumption-created -
boundary is stable -
mhm -
@kevin2kelly -new rules -
feed the network-ecology -
because it’s the network-ecology -
that feeds you -
the words for -
sin - guilt - debt -
the same word -
that's 'original-debt' -
the network-ecology that enables us -
precedes & outlives us -
responsibility without -
response-ability -
is a quagmire that -
many are -
drawn-drowned in -
response-ability -
is natural authority -
for responsibility -
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