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:
How COVID broke the evidence pipeline
Neuroglia-The Alternative Model of the Brain
Articles:
Introducing the Public Interest Internet
Governor Newsom’s Budget Proposes Historic Investment in Public Fiber Broadband
Scientists remotely controlled the social behavior of mice with light
Brain computer interface turns mental handwriting into text on screen
The world's first 'infinite' plastic
Scientists Catch Jumping Genes Rewiring Genomes
Evolution is a Story not of Fitness, but of Relevance
The first cities replicated the environments that once-nomadic people depended on, concentrating shelter and sustenance in one place. The metropolis of the present offers its inhabitants the whole planet in microcosm.
You might assume that cities are too ephemeral to leave behind a fossil. "Most buildings are designed to last for 60 years," says Roma Agrawal, structural engineer for the Shard skyscraper in London. "And I always thought, that feels really short, because that’s my lifetime." If you wanted to build something that would stand in tens of thousands of years, "then the forces that you need to contend with become huge", she explains. Most engineers don't look that far ahead.
We live in the greatest age of city-building the world has ever seen. Three hundred years ago, there was only one city with a population of one million (Edo, modern-day Tokyo). Today there are more than 500, all of them dwarfed by megacities like Mexico City (population: 21 million), Shanghai (24 million), and Tokyo (now 37 million).
How cities will fossilise
With the pandemic now deep into its second year, it’s clear the crisis has exposed major weaknesses in the production and use of research-based evidence — failures that have inevitably cost lives. Researchers have registered more than 2,900 clinical trials related to COVID-19, but the majority are too small or poorly designed to be of much use (see ‘Small samples’). Organizations worldwide have scrambled to synthesize the available evidence on drugs, masks and other key issues, but can’t keep up with the outpouring of new research, and often repeat others’ work. There’s been “research waste at an unprecedented scale”, says Huseyin Naci, who studies health policy at the London School of Economics.
One clear take-home lesson, researchers say, is that countries need more large-scale national and international clinical-trial protocols sitting on the shelf, ready to fire up quickly when a pandemic strikes.
How COVID broke the evidence pipeline
Interoperability is the default state of the world. Anyone’s charcoal will burn in your barbecue, just as anyone’s gas will make your car go. Any manufacturer can make a lightbulb that fits in your light-socket and any shoes can be worn with any socks.
That is to say, banking and aerospace monopolies can get sued for being anticompetitive – but entertainment monopolies can sue you for being pro-competitive. The result is a monopoly that controls access to distribution channels and audiences – that can invoke the power of the state to fine or even im prison people who seek to challenge that monopoly.
Cory Doctorow: IP
Sometimes described as living in the world of the possible, children are open to considering creative options; viewing the world from a perspective of wonder and openness, they seem less burdened by assumptions about what they already know. As one 10-year-old put it: ‘Because adults know so much about what is real and what isn’t, they have less imagination about the possibilities.’
Philosophy with children
Are there problems that take years of intellectual effort to solve, or is most of the effort spent removing obstacles out of the way? Are there solutions that are simple but hidden by wrong assumptions? One could truly say that biology is hampered by the obstacle of lack of information about its intrinsic complexity. We don’t know what we are looking at so we can’t see the simple mechanisms. Here’s the rub though. We don’t even know if there are simple mechanisms!
Neuroglia-The Alternative Model of the Brain
This is a signal we should all be paying attention too - in the age of Climate Change, Pandemic and the emerging economic paradigm of Modern Monetary Theory.
Introducing the Public Interest Internet
When Big Tech is long gone, a better future will come from the seed of this public interest internet: seeds that are being planted now, and which need everyone to nurture them.
on the real internet, one or two clicks away from that handful of conglomerates, there remains a wider, more diverse, and more generous world. Often run by volunteers, frequently without any obvious institutional affiliation, sometimes tiny, often local, but free for everyone online to use and contribute to, this internet preceded Big Tech, and inspired the earliest, most optimistic vision of its future place in society.
The word “internet” has been so effectively hijacked by its most dystopian corners that it’s grown harder to even refer to this older element of online life, let alone bring it back into the forefront of society’s consideration. In his work documenting this space and exploring its future, academic, entrepreneur, and author Ethan Zuckerman has named it our “digital public infrastructure.” Hana Schank and her colleagues at the New America think tank have revitalized discussions around what they call “public interest technology.” In Europe, activists, academics and public sector broadcasters talk about the benefits of the internet’s “public spaces” and improving and expanding the “public stack.” Author and activist Eli Pariser has dedicated a new venture to advancing better digital spaces—what its participants describe as the “New Public”.
And more - I wish the Canadian Government would understand this signal - this is the time.
Laying fiber infrastructure like this brings terabits of broadband capacity to unserved and underserved communities in rural areas. Simultaneously, this plan dramatically lowers the cost to the communities themselves, who are in charge of developing their own, locally appropriate last mile plans.
Governor Newsom’s Budget Proposes Historic Investment in Public Fiber Broadband
This morning, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced his plans for the state’s multi-billion dollar surplus and federal recovery dollars, including a massive, welcome $7 billion investment in public broadband infrastructure. It's a plan that would give California one of the largest public broadband fiber networks in the country. The proposal now heads to the legislature to be ratified by June 15 by a simple majority. Here are the details:
The Plan: California Builds Fiber Broadband Highway; Locals Build the Onramps Internet infrastructure shares many commonalities with public roads. Surface streets that crisscross downtowns and residential areas connect to highways via on-ramps. Those highways are a high-speed, high-capacity system that connect cities to one another over long distances.
In broadband, that highway function— connecting distant communities— is called "the middle mile," while those local roads, which connect with every home and business, are called "the last mile."
national private ISPs have proven themselves unwilling to tackle the rural fiber challenge, even when they stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars by doing so. Their desire for fast profits over long-term investments is so great, they would rather bankrupt themselves before deploying fiber in rural areas. The same is true for low-income access even in the most densely populated cities, which the Governor's plan will enable local solutions to resolve.
Well most people are now familiar with having a wireless mouse - but this is a signal of something way more eerie.
Scientists remotely controlled the social behavior of mice with light
The new devices allow complex wireless control of mouse brain activity
With the help of headsets and backpacks on mice, scientists are using light to switch nerve cells on and off in the rodents’ brains to probe the animals’ social behavior, a new study shows.
These remote control experiments are revealing new insights on the neural circuitry underlying social interactions, supporting previous work suggesting minds in sync are more cooperative, researchers report online May 10 in Nature Neuroscience.
The new devices rely on optogenetics, a technique in which researchers use bursts of light to activate or suppress the brain nerve cells, or neurons, often using tailored viruses to genetically modify cells so they respond to illumination. Scientists have used optogenetics to probe neural circuits in mice and other lab animals to yield insights on how they might work in humans.
Optogenetic devices often feed light to neurons via fiber-optic cables, but such tethers can interfere with natural behaviors and social interactions. While scientists recently developed implantable wireless optogenetic devices, these depend on relatively simple remote controls or limited sets of preprogrammed instructions.
And if that seems like it’s only mice. Another signal of the near future emergence of mind-computer entanglement.
Brain computer interface turns mental handwriting into text on screen
Scientists are exploring a number of ways for people with disabilities to communicate with their thoughts. The newest and fastest turns back to a vintage means for expressing oneself: handwriting.
For the first time, researchers have deciphered the brain activity associated with trying to write letters by hand. Working with a participant with paralysis who has sensors implanted in his brain, the team used an algorithm to identify letters as he attempted to write them. Then, the system displayed the text on a screen—in real time.
The innovation could, with further development, let people with paralysis rapidly type without using their hands, says study coauthor Krishna Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Stanford University who jointly supervised the work with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon.
When we consider the renewable energy available - one can use this energy without a requirement to store it - for difficult material to recycle. This should be part of the design requirements of all industrial products.
As with other feedstock techniques, there is no down-cycling as the polymer bonds can be formed anew, meaning the plastics can be infinitely recycled. With a conversion rate of more than 99%, nearly all the plastic turns into a useful product.
The world's first 'infinite' plastic
Chemical recycling techniques are being trialled across the world. UK-based Recycling Technologies has developed a pyrolysis machine that turns hard-to-recycle plastic such as films, bags and laminated plastics into Plaxx. This liquid hydrocarbon feedstock can be used to make new virgin quality plastic. The first commercial-scale unit was installed in Perth in Scotland in 2020.
The firm Plastic Energy has two commercial-scale pyrolysis plants in Spain and plans to expand into France, the Netherlands and the UK. These plants transform hard-to-recycle plastic waste, such as confectionery wrappers, dry pet food pouches and breakfast cereal bags into substances called "tacoil". This feedstock can be used to make food-grade plastics.
In the US, the chemical company Ineos has become the first to use a technique called depolymerisation on a commercial scale to produce recycled polyethylene, which goes into carrier bags and shrink film. Ineos also has plans to build several new pyrolysis recycling plants.
In the UK, Mura Technology has begun construction of the world's first commercial-scale plant able to recycle all kinds of plastic. The plant can handle mixed plastic, coloured plastic, plastic of all composites, all stages of decay, even plastic contaminated with food or other kinds of waste.
A good signal of the emerging enrichment of our understanding of evolution - the afford-dancing of parts and wholes.
Once the fusion protein is created, “it has a ready-made set of potential binding sites scattered all over the genome,” Adelson said, because its transposase part is still drawn to transposons. The more potential binding sites for the fusion protein, the higher the likelihood that it changes gene expression in the cell, potentially giving rise to new functions.
“These aren’t just new genes, but entire new architectures for proteins,”
Scientists Catch Jumping Genes Rewiring Genomes
Transcription factors that act throughout the genome can arise from mashups of transposable elements inserted into established genes.
Roughly 500 million years ago, something that would forever change the course of eukaryotic development was brewing in the genome of some lucky organism: a gene called Pax6. The gene is thought to have orchestrated the formation of a primitive visual system, and in organisms today, it initiates a genetic cascade that recruits more than 2,000 genes to build different parts of the eye.
Pax6 is only one of thousands of genes encoding transcription factors that each have the powerful ability to amplify and silence thousands of other genes. While geneticists have made leaps in understanding how genes with relatively simple, direct functions could have evolved, explanations for transcription factors have largely eluded scientists. The problem is that the success of a transcription factor depends on how usefully it targets huge numbers of sites throughout the genome simultaneously; it’s hard to picture how natural selection enables that to happen. The answer may hold the key to understanding how complex evolutionary novelties such as eyes arise, said Cédric Feschotte, a molecular biologist at Cornell University.
For more than a decade, Feschotte has pointed to transposons as the ultimate innovators in eukaryotic genomes. Transposons are genetic elements that can copy themselves and insert those copies throughout the genome using a splicing enzyme they make. Feschotte may have finally found the smoking gun he has been looking for: As he and his colleagues recently reported in Science, these jumping genes have fused with other genes nearly 100 times in tetrapods over the past 300 million years, and many of the resulting genetic mashups are likely to encode transcription factors.
Damon Lisch, a plant geneticist at Purdue University who studies transposable elements and was not involved with the study, said he hopes this study pushes back against a widespread but misguided notion that transposons are “junk DNA.” Transposable elements generate tremendous amounts of diversity and have been implicated in the evolution of the placenta and the adaptive immune system, he explained. “These are not junk — they’re living little creatures in your genome that are under very active selection over long periods of time, and what that means is that they evolve new functions to stay in your genome,”
This is a short read - but a great signal on the difference between generalized design vs highly optimized design - one enables vastly more afford-dancing.
A key architectural feature for survival in the biological world is the reusability of the underlying components. All biological life shares the same nucleotides (4) and proteins (21). Evolution has somehow consolidated its design into a reduced instruction set (RISC) computer.
What persists in biology are those components that prove to be ubiquitously useful.
Evolution thus is not a constant struggle for survival as a reading of Darwin may have implied. Rather, it is a constant struggle for usefulness. Every part of biology must justify its existence by revealing its usefulness.
Evolution is a Story not of Fitness, but of Relevance
Organic or biological designs are reusable designs from the ground up. They accommodate the needs of the environment because of the generality of the architecture. They don’t pretend to solve just a narrow problem.
Architectures like biology that lead to general intelligence (i.e. like you) are from the ground up built from reusable components that encourage combinatorial mixing opportunities. One can never correctly guess the needs of the environment (i.e. market).
The opposite of generalization is pre-mature optimization. A company that has is genesis as a one-product company has a bias toward optimizing the entire stack. As a consequence, it compromises reusability and thus shuts of future opportunities for evolution.
The opposable thumb is shared by a common ancestor of the great apes and humans. However, apes have optimized for strength and not dexterity. As a consequence, lost this capability and thus further shut themselves off to an evolution path of higher intelligence.
The human jaw is weaker than apes because humans lost an important gene. However, the consequence of a weaker jaw was a jaw that was more flexible. Thus leading eventually to a richness in vocalization.
#micropoem
spell check ? -
does it make me -
a better speller -
jeezuz -
when was the last time -
i went to a dictionary -
to check spelling -
of a word? -
there can be -
artfulness-fore -
learning pleasure -
taking -
receiving -
taceive -
in seeing-as-it-is -
or-tfully -
thinking about conversation -
that orgasgenates -
social-thinking -
and how we spark -
each other -
with friction -
but not conflict -
there’s an orthogonality -
in each’s -
Meta-mor-Phor-ing -
In the age of -
autospell-check -
how -
ow -
do we know -
when wordplay is -
auto-undone - -
Yeah - writing is re-writing
To be alive -
is to live -
in the middle -
excluded -
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