Thursday, June 10, 2021

Friday Thinking 11 June, 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




with a wider aperture, we now know that prosperity, and the absence of war, is the fundamental precondition of the global transition to democracy, most of which has transpired in the postwar era. In 1939, roughly 12 per cent of the population of the world lived in democracies, but by the end of the 20th century nearly 60 per cent did.

Exit the Fatherland





our society has profoundly changed in the past 50 years, putting the established hierarchy of love on shaky ground. It’s no longer the case that you have to be ‘coupled up’ to fit society’s norms, to have children or, as a woman, to make sure you’re economically provided for. As a consequence, within the West – although not necessarily elsewhere – romantic love has become a choice rather than a necessity. If children aren’t your thing, then greater control of your own fertility means that you can also dispense with parental love. But you discard the love that exists within your friendships at your peril, because, new findings show, friends are your key to a long, happy and chilled life.

Being within a supportive social network reduced the risk of mortality by 50 per cent. That places it on a par with quitting smoking, and of more influence than maintaining a healthy BMI measure. Since Holt-Lunstad and colleagues reported their findings, study after study has reinforced this conclusion, to the extent that we can now argue that the nature of your social network, and the strength and health of the relationships within it, is the biggest single factor influencing your health, happiness and longevity. They are your survival.

The term ‘chosen family’ was first coined in the US during the 1970s and ’80s to describe the networks of friends that provided emotional support and nurture to those who’d been rejected by their own family or who were excluded from legally sanctioned methods of creating a family such as marriage or parenthood. 

These families were bound by a shared identity rather than shared blood – they were fictive kin. While those who pioneered this new form of ‘friend’ family in the 1970s have now grown old within the bosom of their chosen family, recent work among younger communities in the US has shown that chosen families are as important to the lives and as vital to the security and development of young people as they’ve always been

Treasure them




Decades of research suggest that reason is lazy and biased in our favour. In the interactionist picture, these are features, not bugs – they allow for an elegant division of cognitive labour, enabling us to arrive at the truth by working together. Our legal system, though predating these arguments by hundreds of years, embraces the biased nature of reason. Each lawyer is, in a way, meant to be biased. But that’s not a problem, because justice is meant to emerge from the interaction between each side’s lawyers, the jury and the judge – it’s not up to the individual lawyer to decide. Similarly, truth can emerge as a result of each side giving their reasons, because, although we’re biased when evaluating our own reasons, we’re relatively good at evaluating the reasons of others.

If the interactionist picture is right, then the development of our rational capacities requires outward expression and engagement. Good reasoning, then, is much more like tennis than like mountain climbing – one can, in principle, do the latter alone, but to become better at tennis, one must find someone else to play with, preferably of a similar skill level. Analogously, in order to develop our rational capacities, we must find others who can challenge our ideas and expose us to different ways of thinking about things. We can’t reason well if we surround ourselves with people who think exactly like us. Indeed, a large body of social scientific research suggests that groups of like minded individuals, no matter how smart or educated they are, often reason very poorly, especially if they have affective ties to one another.

as John Stuart Mill emphasised more than a century and a half ago, legal protections often aren’t enough – as social creatures, we’re very sensitive to ostracism as well as the professional costs that might accompany our speech. Given recent trends then, there’s a pressing need for further enquiry into how we might promote and cultivate habits of speaking our minds, and how we might (re)structure our intellectual institutions to allow multiple perspectives to exist and engage with each other. If Aristotle is right, these might be necessary, but perhaps underappreciated, conditions for our flourishing.

Dare to speak your mind and together we flourish






This is a good signal of the transformation of the Internet.
Google has already reported that Quic promises to decrease the wait time for web search results by eight percent on PCs and by four percent on phones. Similarly, Quic also appears to lessen the buffering time for YouTube videos by 18 percent on PCs and 15 percent on mobile devices.

Google's Quic transmission protocol speeds up the Internet's flagship TCP

On the horizon for eight years now, Google's planned replacement for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), Quic, seems to be finally underway. In fact, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published Quic as a standard for the worldwide network earlier this week. If successful, this protocol might replace TCP, which has dominated the Internet transmission space since 1974.

Indeed, online services and web browsers have already been experimenting with this technology for years. However, now that the IETF has officially released the standard, global users might be more inclined to fully transition to Quic.

Google first revealed Quic as a trial addition to its Chrome browser back in 2013. 

That said, given the intricate amount of data, devices, programs and services involved in legacy Internet transmission protocols and infrastructure, Quic has taken a fair amount of time to develop. Still, as the world advances and our Internet must adapt to manage more and more data, upgrades like Quic, HTTPS for secure communications and post-quantum cryptography to safeguard data from potential future quantum computers, as well as the updated IPv6, have all been initiatives to accommodate a fast-growing virtual world with both increasing users and devices.


This is a great warning about the dangers of the enclosure of the Internet into Feudal platforms - a few months old - but worth the pondering.
Apple has now arrogated to itself the power to know, with a reasonable degree of granularity, which programs its custom­ers are using, and to decide whether customers should be permitted to do so. … The only thing that stops Apple from blocking you from running legitimate apps – or from gathering information about your movements and social activities – is its goodwill and good judgment, and therein lies the problem.

Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor

As I write this in mid-November 2020, there’s quite a stir over the new version of Apple’s Mac OS, the operating system that runs on its laptops. For more than a year, Apple has engaged in a covert, global surveillance of its users through its operating system, which automatically sent information about which apps you were running to Apple, and which gave Apple a remote veto over whether that program would launch when you double-clicked it. Most Apple customers don’t know about this, but the kind of Apple user who does know about it is also likely to be the kind of security-conscious person who doesn’t like it and even takes steps to block it.

A confluence of events has tipped this obscure “feature” into global notoriety: first, Apple suffered an outage in the servers that received this information and okayed the launch of its customers’ programs, meaning that Mac OS us­ers couldn’t run the programs they relied on to do their work. To make things worse, the outage coincided with the release of “Big Sur,” the latest version of Mac OS, which locks out the aftermar­ket additions that privacy- and security-conscious Apple customers use to block Apple’s OS-level surveillance. In other words, at the very same moment that millions of Apple device owners were discovering why they might want to switch off this hidden “feature,” Apple made it all but impossible to do so.

All this was written up in “Your Computer Isn’t Yours,” ( http://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-yours/ ) an excellent article by Jeffrey Paul, a Berlin-based technologist. Paul makes the point that the latest Apple hardware will only run the new, more-surveillant version of Mac OS, so, barring a change in Apple’s corporate philosophy, this is the future of Mac OS. Paul also namechecked me at the start of his essay, which means that I got a look at it early and have had occasion to follow along with the commentary it provoked.

The security researcher (and Hugo Award-nominee) Bruce Schneier has a name for this arrangement: he calls it feudal security. 


A good book review - illuminating the plant internet - the systems and networks of exchange that are the foundation of viable and flourishing ecologies.

It takes a wood to raise a tree: a memoir

An ecologist traces forests’ support networks — and finds parallels in her own life.
In 1997, ecologist Suzanne Simard made the cover of Nature with the discovery of a subterranean lace of tree roots and fungal filaments, or hyphae, in British Columbia. It was “a network as brilliant as a Persian rug”, she recalls in her memoir Finding the Mother Tree — a network through which multiple tree species were exchanging carbon. The trees were cooperating.

The discovery of this fungal network, or ‘wood wide web’, as it came to be known, upended a dominant scientific narrative — that competition is the primary force shaping forests. Forest ecology is instead a much more nuanced dance, in which species sometimes fight and sometimes get along. This calls into question the way that most foresters manage trees. Clear-cutting, weeding and planting single species in well-spaced rows makes sense only if trees do best when they have all the resources they need to themselves.


This is a nice account - a 54 min Youtube - of why AI is hard - harder than we continue to imagine.

Why AI is harder than we think. Melanie Mitchell. Santa Fe Institute

Abstract:  
Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment (“AI Spring”) and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding (“AI Winter”).  Even with today’s seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars and housekeeping robots has turned out to be much harder than we thought.  

One reason for these repeating cycles is a lack of understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself.   In this talk I will discuss some fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field.  I will also speculate on what is needed for the grand challenge of making AI systems more robust, general, and adaptable—in short, more intelligent. 

Speaker Bio: Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science (currently on leave) at Portland State University. 


I think most people would agree we live in ‘interesting times’ - and just as interesting we continue to progress with interesting time. 

Nuclear clocks could outdo atomic clocks as the most precise timepieces

But first, physicists need to figure out how to build them
If physicists can build them, nuclear clocks would be a brand-new type of clock, one that would keep time based on the physics of atoms’ hearts. Today’s most precise clocks, called atomic clocks, rely on the behavior of atoms’ electrons. But a clock based on atomic nuclei could reach 10 times the precision of those atomic clocks, researchers estimate.

Better clocks could improve technologies that depend on them, such as GPS navigation, physicist Peter Thirolf said June 3 during an online meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. But “it’s not just about timekeeping.” Unlike atoms’ electrons, atomic nuclei are subject to the strong nuclear force, which holds protons and neutrons together. “A nuclear clock sees a different part of the world,” said Thirolf, of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in Germany. That means nuclear clocks could allow new tests of fundamental ideas in physics, including whether supposedly immutable numbers in physics known as fundamental constants are, in fact, constant.


A very good signal for ensuring clean drinking water anywhere.
The membrane eliminates a wide range of water-borne viruses, including nonenveloped adenoviruses, retroviruses and enteroviruses. This third group can cause dangerous gastrointestinal infections, which kill around half a million people—often young children in developing and emerging countries—every year. Enteroviruses are extremely tough and acid-resistant and remain in the water for a very long time, so the filter membrane should be particularly attractive to poorer countries as a way to help prevent such infections.
Moreover, the membrane also eliminates H1N1 flu viruses and even the new SARS-CoV-2 virus from the water with great efficiency. 

Filter membrane renders viruses harmless

Viruses can spread not only via droplets or aerosols like the new coronavirus, but in water, too. In fact, some potentially dangerous pathogens of gastrointestinal diseases are water-borne viruses.

To date, such viruses have been removed from water using nanofiltration or reverse osmosis, but at high cost and severe impact on the environment.

an international team of researchers led by Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich, has developed a new water filter membrane that is both highly effective and environmentally friendly. To manufacture it, the researchers used natural raw materials.

Manufacturing the membrane is relatively simple. To produce the fibrils, whey proteins derived from milk processing are added to acid and heated to 90 degrees Celsius. This causes the proteins to extend and attach to each other, forming fibrils. The nanoparticles can be produced in the same reaction vessel as the fibrils: the researchers raise the pH and add iron salt, causing the mixture to disintegrate into iron hydroxide nanoparticles, which attach to the amyloid fibrils. For this application, Mezzenga and his colleagues used cellulose to support the membrane.


This is a great signal of the emerging understanding of how our mental and physical health is dependent on our microbial ecologies.
 … team set out to create a microbiome-based food supplement by testing foods common to the local diet and seeing which foods boosted healthy bacteria.  The team also tested a way to measure the food’s impact by characterizing the gut bacteria in healthy and malnourished children and developing a pattern of markers in the blood. This pattern let the team understand how undernutrition changes the body, and also track gut microbiome changes.

Food that boosts gut microbes could be a new way to help malnourished kids

Malnourished children fed the new food did better than those who got traditional supplements
According to UNICEF, more than 1 in 5 children under age 5, or 149.2 million, are coping with undernutrition — a form of malnutrition most common in low- and middle-income countries. Undernutrition leaves children stunted, or short for their age, and wasted, underweight for their height. And it can be deadly: Globally, 5.2 million children under age 5 died in 2019; 45 percent of those deaths are linked to nutrition-related issues, according to the World Health Organization.

The COVID-19 pandemic was expected to make things worse, disrupting nutrition programs and families’ ability to find and afford food, researchers reported in May 2020 in the Lancet Global Health.

Children fed a new kind of food supplement, aimed at not only nourishing them but restoring helpful bacteria in their guts, gained more weight on average than children fed traditional high-caloric supplements, Ahmed and his colleagues reported in a preliminary study April 7 in the New England Journal of Medicine. In six months, the researchers hope to have results that determine whether those gains persist.

The approach is based on more than a decade of work, led by Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, on whether disruptions in our gut microbiota could cause malnutrition. The team has found that malnourished babies lack beneficial gut microbes, and the problem lingers even after the babies are fed foods designed to boost their weight. Those gut microbes are important for metabolism, immunity, digestion and overall development, so the lack of them stymies efforts to help these kids catch up. 


Another signal in the nature and nurture conversation - dimensions of possibility in self-directed evolution?
"This research explains why humans are such a unique species. We evolve both genetically and culturally over time, but we are slowly becoming ever more cultural and ever less genetic," Waring says.

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics

In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.

After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.

Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.


This is a great signal - for easier wider access to seeing beyond what we see now - advancing science yes but - I wonder when it will hit consumer products?
"This material converts low resolution light to high resolution light," said Zhaowei Liu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego. "It's very simple and easy to use. Just place a sample on the material, then put the whole thing under a normal microscope—no fancy modification needed."

Light-shrinking material lets ordinary microscope see in super resolution

Electrical engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that improves the resolution of an ordinary light microscope so that it can be used to directly observe finer structures and details in living cells.

The technology turns a conventional light microscope into what's called a super-resolution microscope. It involves a specially engineered material that shortens the wavelength of light as it illuminates the sample—this shrunken light is what essentially enables the microscope to image in higher resolution.

The work, which was published in Nature Communications, overcomes a big limitation of conventional light microscopes: low resolution. Light microscopes are useful for imaging live cells, but they cannot be used to see anything smaller. Conventional light microscopes have a resolution limit of 200 nanometers, meaning that any objects closer than this distance will not be observed as separate objects. And while there are more powerful tools out there such as electron microscopes, which have the resolution to see subcellular structures, they cannot be used to image living cells because the samples need to be placed inside a vacuum chamber.


mhm - some people are dogs - some people are cats - some are cogs or dats - this is for cat lovers.

New research analyses the relationship between cats and their owners

Co-dependent and clingy or casual and aloof—a new study has examined the behavior of pet cats to understand what it means about their relationship with their owner, and the research suggests it's a two-way street!

The research, "My Cat and Me—a Study of Cat Owner Perceptions of Their Bond and Relationship," by academics at the University of Lincoln, UK, involved nearly 4000 owners responding to a series of statements about their own behavior and that of their pet.

In addition to the research, the University of Lincoln has launched a new interactive quiz on its website so cat owners can find out what kind of relationship they have with their feline companions.

Despite the cat's popularity as a pet, little is known about its bond and relationship with owners. The study identifies and characterizes the different types of relationship which cats might establish with their owners by using human attachment and social support theories.



#micropoem




Analogia - 
by george dyson - 

panoramic - 
as a weaving of lived experiences-
research - 

an autobiography -
embodied account of  -
narrated transdiscipline -
research -
reasonings -
real-magicisms - 
beyond control



What's worse -
than a curious life ? -

not knowing -
that you don't know -



could it also be -
that innocence is worse -
than a curious life ?- 
mhm - 
hegel syllogism - 
innocence - 
loss (negation) - 
enlightenment (negation-of-negation) - 
innocence is sublated -
in enlightenment  -

as-if-I-knew -

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