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:
Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' has been completely unraveled by the pandemic
Articles:
Bye, bye, baby? Birthrates are declining globally – here's why it matters
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
The first mobile phone call was 75 years ago
Say goodbye to your camera bump: Miniaturized optics through new counterpart to lens
New super-resolution microscopy method approaches the atomic scale
Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data
New discovery shows human cells can write RNA sequences into DNA
mRNA vaccine yields full protection against malaria in mice
'Vegan spider silk' provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics
Many cosmetics contain hidden, potentially dangerous ‘forever chemicals’
The viability of farming depends not just on access to the few wild species that can be shaped into crops and flocks, but on predictable weather patterns. The Holocene is not just warmer and wetter than the Pleistocene glacial that preceded it. It’s much more stable. Grain agriculture never developed in Aboriginal Australia in part because of the marked annual variation in many Australian climates. Without industrial storage and transport, dependence on crops would have been suicidal. Whatever the causes of this revolutionary change, its consequences were immense. Farming and storage make inequality possible, perhaps even likely, because they tend to undermine sharing norms, establish property rights and the coercion of labour, amplify intercommunal violence, and lead to increases in social scale.
How equality slipped away
There's a reason why libertarians have been so quiet since COVID arrived on our shores a year ago, and why Republican hyper-conservatives were bleating about Dr. Seuss when Democrats were passing an incredibly popular pandemic relief package.
The pandemic is proof of the single inescapable fact that destroys Ayn Rand's philosophy: We live in a society, and nobody is truly a self-made master of their own destiny. The sooner we understand the American ideal of sovereign individualism is the stuff of science-fiction, the faster we can get to work building a world that's better for everyone.
Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' has been completely unraveled by the pandemic
When you take a Facebook post with you to a new platform, do you get to take other peoples’ comments, too? On the one hand, it sure feels like “things people said to me about my stuff” is part of “my data,” but at the same time, “things I said to other people about their stuff” is also “my data.” Do you need to get all your friends’ consent before you can take their comments? What if they’ve left Facebook already? What if they’re dead? What if the comment you want to take with you is from your enemy, who left a comment so exquisitely stupid that you want to make sure it’s preserved for all eternity? Do you need your enemy’s permission to preserve a copy of their insults?
These aren’t just good, chewy questions for privacy advocates — questions smart people have been pondering for a long time — they’re also fast becoming a favored talking point of Big Tech, its shills, simps, and lobbyists.
“You can’t make us give people their own data back,” Big Tech says, “because it’s not their data! It’s data whose title is so entangled that we alone are entitled to control it.”
That’s an awfully convenient argument. But it raises an inconvenient question: If this data is so gnarly that no one can hope to untangle it, how did Big Tech come to take possession of it in the first place?
Consent theater is a sociopath’s charter: “Yes, I stabbed you 11 times, but you agreed that I could when you came close enough to read my ‘By reading this sign, you give consent for me to stab you’ sign.”
Consent Theater
In 1914, on the eve of World War I, Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce celebrated the utopian promise of insurance. In an address delivered at the University of California at Berkeley, Royce welcomed what he called “the coming social order of the insurer”—a new system of global governance based on the model of mutual insurance. Building on the work of fellow philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Royce imagined on the horizon a global “community of insurance” made up of all the nations of the world.
Under this new system, Royce predicted, every nation would contribute to a large insurance pool overseen by an independent world body. The result would not only insure the peoples of the world against future disasters, natural and manmade. It would also help bring them closer together by encouraging a spirit of interdependence and mutual aid—a “genuine community of mankind” that would contribute “to peace, to loyalty, to social unity, to active charity, as no other community of interpretation has ever done.”
Forty years later, American science fiction authors Frederik Pohl and Lester del Rey imagined a vastly different insurance future. Their 1955 novel, Preferred Risk, depicts a dystopian insurance era ruled by “The Company,” a massive insurance firm that achieves total global domination, displacing state governments. The Company rises to power by distributing insurance for everything imaginable: hunger, natural disasters, reproduction, war. It rules over humanity by refining every action and consequence down to a scale of precise probabilities, represented in complex actuarial tables decipherable only by experts. Most people embrace the new era, despite being permanently segregated into risk classes that dictate what they eat, where they live, how they work, and who they meet. Others struggle simply to survive. A desperate group of outcasts—the “uninsurables”—live miserably on the outskirts of society, shunned as deviants by those lucky enough to be classified as “preferred risks.”
Our Insurance Dystopia
An important signal that is not new - but gaining recognition - one reason to anticipate huge flocks of robots.
Most children these days are wanted or planned children, especially in the developed world. Deciding to have a baby is contingent on being optimistic about the future
Bye, bye, baby? Birthrates are declining globally – here's why it matters
China has experienced a fertility collapse. According to the latest census released in May, China is losing roughly 400,000 people every year. China still claims its population is growing, but even if these projections are taken at face value, the population decline previously projected to start by midcentury may now begin as early as 2030. This means China could lose between 600 and 700 million people from its population by 2100.
That’s right: 600 and 700 million people, or about half of its total population today.
China’s population changes are not unique among the superpowers. According to the United States’ most recent census, the US birthrate has declined for six straight years and 19% since 2007 in total. Like China, the US birthrate is now well below replacement rate at 1.6. (China is now at 1.3.) For a country to naturally replace its population, its birthrate needs to be at least 2.1.
You can also add the world’s second-most populous country, India, to the list of low-fertility countries, with a birthrate at replacement rate (2.1). Also include Japan (1.3), Russia (1.6), Brazil (1.8), Bangladesh (1.7) and Indonesia (2.0).
There are still big countries with high birthrates, such as Pakistan (3.4) and Nigeria (5.1). But even these numbers are lower than they were in 1960 – when Pakistan was at 6.6 and Nigeria at 6.4 – and declining every year.
A great signal of the emerging of a new economic paradigm to displace the dysfunctions of neoliberalism - along with the rise of Modern Monetary Theory.
Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism
As the UK prepares to host November’s crucial COP26 climate summit, international governments are under pressure to deepen their carbon-reduction targets amidst a worsening climate crisis. The mood music seems to finally be shifting on green issues, with financial markets going green, the UK Treasury reporting on biodiversity and even Bill Gates weighing into the conversation. However emissions continue to rise, and a gnawing feeling remains that central governments are dragging their feet on actions that meet the scale of the challenge.
Enter Mariana Mazzucato, and her timely new book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. Part policy critique, part manifesto, Mission Economy reinvigorates the role of the state for tackling today’s complex problems, demanding vision, ambition and public purpose in economic strategy. The book is short, accessible and written with an urgency befitting this time of crises. But as persistent constraints continue to limit green policy at national and international levels, can Mazzucato’s approach unlock much needed systemic transitions, and work at the global scale?
Mazzucato starts by diagnosing our dysfunctional form of contemporary capitalism, fuelled by and fuelling climate crisis. She identifies four drivers of this dysfunction: 1) finance sector short-termism; 2) the financialisation of business and value; 3) fossil fuel dependency; and 4) slow or absent governments. Lamenting the UK’s ‘infantilised’ civil service and the depletion of Western governments through dereglation and outsourcing, Mazzucato highlights a toxic, self-fulfilling prophecy at play: ‘the less government does, the less it takes risks and manages, the less capacity it develops, and the more boring it is to work for’ (49). The resulting drain limits public sector leadership, and possibilities for green strategy.
Seeing a weak signal in technology development and imagining the possible is hard and the timeline for a possible to manifest as a public or consumer good - is most often long and winding. There are 3 short videos as well including one from the 40s illustrating and explaining the capability.
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated in 1973, nearly three decades after the introduction of the first mobile phone service. It was nearly three decades after that before half the U.S. population had a mobile phone.
Your cellphone is a result of over a hundred years of commercial and government investment in research and development in all of its components and related technologies.
The first mobile phone call was 75 years ago
– what it takes for technologies to go from breakthrough to big time
I have a cellphone built into my watch. People now take this type of technology for granted, but not so long ago it was firmly in the realm of science fiction. The transition from fantasy to reality was far from the flip of a switch. The amount of time, money, talent and effort required to put a telephone on my wrist spanned far beyond any one product development cycle.
The people who crossed a wristwatch with a cellphone worked hard for several years to make it happen, but technology development really occurs on a timescale of decades. While the last steps of technological development capture headlines, it takes thousands of scientists and engineers working for decades on myriad technologies to get to the point where blockbuster products begin to capture the public’s imagination.
The first mobile phone service, for 80-pound telephones installed in cars, was demonstrated on June 17, 1946, 75 years ago. The service was only available in major cities and highway corridors and was aimed at companies rather than individuals. The equipment filled much of a car’s trunk, and subscribers made calls by picking up the handset and speaking to a switchboard operator. By 1948, the service had 5,000 customers.
It’s not just the mobile phone - but the mobile universal tool that is now ubiquitous - it is amazing to reflect that 20 years ago photography still generally required us to process physical film in order to view and collect our pictures. Today basically everyone is a photographer of some sort and the number of pictures being taken and stored continues to increase exponentially.
This is exciting because this device will let us shrink down all sorts of very large devices that we thought were impossible to miniaturize in optics. In order to design it, we need to come up with a new set of rules that is incompatible with that used in lens design. Nobody knows what they are, it's like the wild west.
Say goodbye to your camera bump: Miniaturized optics through new counterpart to lens
Can you imagine one day using a telescope as thin as a sheet of paper, or a much smaller and lighter high-performance camera? Or no longer having that camera bump behind your smartphone?
In a paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Ottawa have proposed a new optical element that could turn these ideas into reality by dramatically miniaturizing optical devices, potentially impacting many of the applications in our lives.
To learn more about this project, we talked to lead author Dr. Orad Reshef, a senior postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Boyd Group, and research lead Dr. Jeff Lundeen, who is the Canada Research Chair in Quantum Photonics, Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, and head of the Lundeen Lab.
The article An optic to replace space and its application towards ultra-thin imaging systems is published in Nature Communications.
What we are becoming able to see is amazing.
New super-resolution microscopy method approaches the atomic scale
Scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine have developed a computational technique that greatly increases the resolution of atomic force microscopy, a specialized type of microscope that "feels" the atoms at a surface. The method reveals atomic-level details on proteins and other biological structures under normal physiological conditions, opening a new window on cell biology, virology and other microscopic processes.
In a study, published June 16 in Nature, the investigators describe the new technique, which is based on a strategy used to improve resolution in light microscopy.
To study proteins and other biomolecules at high resolution, investigators have long relied on two techniques: X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy. While both methods can determine molecular structures down to the resolution of individual atoms, they do so on molecules that are either scaffolded into crystals or frozen at ultra-cold temperatures, possibly altering them from their normal physiological shapes. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) can analyze biological molecules under normal physiological conditions, but the resulting images have been blurry and low resolution.
And storage itself also continues to increase in capacity.
Ultra-high-density hard drives made with graphene store ten times more data
Graphene can be used for ultra-high density hard disk drives (HDD), with up to a tenfold jump compared to current technologies, researchers at the Cambridge Graphene Center have shown.
The study, published in Nature Communications, was carried out in collaboration with teams at the University of Exeter, India, Switzerland, Singapore, and the US.
HDDs first appeared in the 1950s, but their use as storage devices in personal computers only took off from the mid-1980s. They have become ever smaller in size, and denser in terms of the number of stored bytes. While solid state drives are popular for mobile devices, HDDs continue to be used to store files in desktop computers, largely due to their favorable cost to produce and purchase.
The data density of HDDs has quadrupled since 1990, and the COC thickness has reduced from 12.5nm to around 3nm, which corresponds to one terabyte per square inch. Now, graphene has enabled researchers to multiply this by ten.
We continue to learn more and more as we progress in our domestication of DNA - this is a significant signal that may change our understanding of evolution.
"Our research suggests that polymerase theta's main function is to act as a reverse transcriptase," says Dr. Pomerantz. "In healthy cells, the purpose of this molecule may be toward RNA-mediated DNA repair. In unhealthy cells, such as cancer cells, polymerase theta is highly expressed and promotes cancer cell growth and drug resistance. It will be exciting to further understand how polymerase theta's activity on RNA contributes to DNA repair and cancer-cell proliferation."
New discovery shows human cells can write RNA sequences into DNA
Cells contain machinery that duplicates DNA into a new set that goes into a newly formed cell. That same class of machines, called polymerases, also build RNA messages, which are like notes copied from the central DNA repository of recipes, so they can be read more efficiently into proteins. But polymerases were thought to only work in one direction DNA into DNA or RNA. This prevents RNA messages from being rewritten back into the master recipe book of genomic DNA. Now, Thomas Jefferson University researchers provide the first evidence that RNA segments can be written back into DNA, which potentially challenges the central dogma in biology and could have wide implications affecting many fields of biology.
"This work opens the door to many other studies that will help us understand the significance of having a mechanism for converting RNA messages into DNA in our own cells," says Richard Pomerantz, Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Thomas Jefferson University. "The reality that a human polymerase can do this with high efficiency, raises many questions." For example, this finding suggests that RNA messages can be used as templates for repairing or re-writing genomic DNA.
The work was published June 11th in the journal Science Advances.
Covid is bad - and yet it has accelerated some science that may bring huge benefits for other diseases.
"Our vaccine achieved high levels of protection against malaria infection in mice," said Katherine Mallory, a WRAIR researcher at the time of the article's submission and lead author on the paper. "While more work remains before clinical testing, these results are an encouraging sign that an effective, mRNA-based malaria vaccine is achievable."
mRNA vaccine yields full protection against malaria in mice
Scientists from the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Naval Medical Research Center partnered with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Acuitas Therapeutics to develop a novel vaccine based on mRNA technology that protects against malaria in animal models, publishing their findings in npj Vaccines.
In 2019, there were an estimated 229 million cases of malaria and 409,000 deaths globally, creating an extraordinary cost in terms of human morbidity, mortality, economic burden, and regional social stability. Worldwide, Plasmodium falciparum is the parasite species which causes the vast majority of deaths. Those at highest risk of severe disease include pregnant women, children and malaria naïve travelers. Malaria countermeasures development has historically been a priority research area for the Department of Defense as the disease remains a top threat to U.S. military forces deployed to endemic regions.
A safe, effective malaria vaccine has long been an elusive target for scientists. The most advanced malaria vaccine is RTS,S, a first-generation product developed in partnership with WRAIR. RTS,S is based on the circumsporozoite protein of P. falciparum, the most dangerous and widespread species of malaria parasite. While RTS,S is an impactful countermeasure in the fight against malaria, field studies have revealed limited sterile efficacy and duration of protection. The limitations associated with RTS,S and other first-generation malaria vaccines have led scientists to evaluate new platforms and second-generation approaches for malaria vaccines.
Here is another signal of the emerging transformation of plastic to support a metabolic consumer economy - where plastics and be used everywhere and safely composted or re-manufactured.
'Vegan spider silk' provides sustainable alternative to single-use plastics
Researchers have created a plant-based, sustainable, scalable material that could replace single-use plastics in many consumer products.
The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, created a polymer film by mimicking the properties of spider silk, one of the strongest materials in nature. The new material is as strong as many common plastics in use today and could replace plastic in many common household products.
The material was created using a new approach for assembling plant proteins into materials which mimic silk on a molecular level. The energy-efficient method, which uses sustainable ingredients, results in a plastic-like free-standing film, which can be made at industrial scale. Non-fading 'structural' color can be added to the polymer, and it can also be used to make water-resistant coatings.
The material is home compostable, whereas other types of bioplastics require industrial composting facilities to degrade. In addition, the Cambridge-developed material requires no chemical modifications to its natural building blocks, so that it can safely degrade in most natural environments.
The cost of glamor involves a lot more than whether cosmetics are tested on animals or not.
Peaslee’s team measured the amount of fluorine, a key component of PFAS, in 231 cosmetics. Sixty-three percent of foundations, 55 percent of lip products and 82 percent of waterproof mascara contained high levels of fluorine — at least 0.384 micrograms of fluorine per square centimeter of product spread on a piece of paper. Long-lasting or waterproof products were especially likely to contain lots of fluorine. That makes sense, since PFAS are water-resistant.
Many cosmetics contain hidden, potentially dangerous ‘forever chemicals’
Scientists found signs of long-lasting PFAS compounds in about half of tested makeup products
A new chemical analysis has revealed an ugly truth about beauty products: Many may contain highly persistent, potentially harmful “forever chemicals” called PFAS.
PFAS, short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, include thousands of chemicals that are so sturdy they can linger in the body for years and the environment for centuries. The health effects of only a few PFAS are well known, but those compounds have been linked to high cholesterol, thyroid diseases and other problems.
“There is no known good PFAS,” says chemist and physicist Graham Peaslee of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
In the first large screening of cosmetics for PFAS in the United States and Canada, Peaslee and colleagues found that 52 percent of over 200 tested products had high fluorine concentrations, suggesting the presence of PFAS, the researchers report online June 15 in Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
#micropoem
We are such social beings -
only able to 'be' because of 'we' -
but also the paradox of -
only 'me' -
can enact a choice -
to see reality as it is -
and to enable -
a flourishing of all of 'we' -
it’s homeostasis itself -
that’s the boss -
the general will of the parts reflecting -
as whole -
homeostasis is self-governance of viable ecology -
homeostasis is -
accounting -
credits-debts -
of viable social -
chemistry -
fabric -
entanglement -
