Thursday, June 17, 2021

Friday Thinking 18 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



After publishing her Nature paper, Simard showed that trees direct more resources to their offspring than they do to unrelated seedlings. The finding suggests that trees maintain a level of control through the network that one might call intelligence. As she argues, plants seem to have agency. They perceive, relate and communicate, make decisions, learn and remember, she writes: “qualities we normally ascribe to sentience, wisdom”. For Simard, that implies that they are due a certain respect.

It takes a wood to raise a tree: a memoir




In an influential 1943 essay, Polish economist Michał Kalecki staged a contest between capitalism’s pursuit of profit and its pursuit of power. While the benefits of government-sponsored full employment would benefit capitalists economically, Kalecki argued, it would also fundamentally threaten their social position—and the latter mattered more. If wide sections of the country came to believe that the government could replace the private sector as a source of investment and even hiring, capitalists would have to relinquish their role as the ultimate guardians of national economic health, and along with it their immense power over workers. Kalecki thus saw how the desire to maintain political dominance could override purely economic considerations.

in 1969, Jacobs describes in The Economy of Cities how close connections between many mutually dependent consumers and suppliers are the key to technological innovation and economic growth: they allow new economic niches to be continuously identified and filled with new companies and products.

In the Common Interest




It’s common to think of the universe as being built from fundamental particles: electrons, quarks, photons and the like. But physics long ago moved beyond this view. Instead of particles, physicists now talk about things called “quantum fields” as the real warp and woof of reality.

These fields stretch across the space-time of the universe. They come in many varieties and fluctuate like a rolling ocean. As the fields ripple and interact with each other, particles emerge out of them and then vanish back into them, like the fleeting crests of a wave.

“Particles are not objects that are there forever,” said Tong. “It’s a dance of fields.”

The Mystery at the Heart of Physics That Only Math Can Solve





The emerging phase of the digital environment certainly requires better, more comprehensive and more transparent design.
After toiling away with how to fix this issue for years, the company believes it has found the antidote. With the upcoming release of Android 12, Google will launch the evolution of Material Design dubbed Material You.
Most of all, the new Android will be easily customizable. (That’s the “You” part.) Think of Material You as a coded, Google design consultant. But the user is still the creative director.

See Google’s Expressive New Design Language, Built by Billions of Users

Called Material You, Google believes the future of interface should be shaped by its users
It’s hard to remember now, but once upon a time, Google was terrible at design. Android was ugly. Google sites were ugly. And the company lacked a serious industrial design program. But in 2014, Google revealed a unified approach to design to help fix it all. Called Material Design, it reimagined all of Google’s apps with a new visual metaphor of digital paper and ink. Ugly pages were replaced by clear, clean cards. Supporting animations were simple and effective. Google got design, and shared this design language with any developer who wanted to adopt it.

The problem was that the language didn’t leave much room for expression and creativity. And nearly a decade later, Google VP of Design Matias Duarte looks back at the language he helped create, and sees its shortcomings. “The material metaphor was maybe too good, and the paper has come to dominate our interfaces,” says Duarte. “They are consistent…but they’ve gotten a little stale, boring, too tied to a modernist same-ism that is spread everywhere.” That’s especially problematic today, as design is trending maximal and customizable while Google has perfected the stoic and functional.


While design language is vital - design principles are equally so - especially if we want a digital and physical environment that enables a flourishing level playing field for cooperation and productive competition. The point of competition is to incentivize the capacity for any player to enter the field easily with better ideas, products and services. Enclosing our physical, digital and creative commons - produces monopolies and monopsonies.

Inside the Clock Tower: An Interoperability Story

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee introduced a package of bills to address concerns with the market power exerted by large online platforms. One of these is the ACCESS Act. It would mandate interoperability for large online platforms, meaning, in part, that a consumer could still connect with her friends through Facebook even if she moved to another social media platform and deleted her own Facebook account.

It can be difficult to visualize all the ways a concept like interoperability really matters. So we asked Cory Doctorow for a piece of short fiction to explore how the online world might evolve with interoperability. Doctorow is a master of speculative tech fiction who has published a bookshelf’s worth of novels and nonfiction works, as well as a technology activist and a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group.


Although this may seem like an ad for Estonia - it’s an important signal about the world of secure communication and Identities. 

Estonia’s Levercode – the next generation of data governance?

Surprisingly enough, 80 percent of data encryption services used today rely on a system that dates back five decades. Levercode is out to change it with a new encryption system. 
Flexible and scalable, the Tallinn-based company is building its tools for the long haul, but it still has to replace legacy encryption systems that have been in use for decades.

“LeverID was built in a way that we could interchange cryptography standards in a relatively easy way,” noted Poola. “If we were to arrive at a post-quantum computing standard, we could integrate that into our solution,” he says. “That is a large advantage, having that modularity.”

Levercode doesn’t use RSA in its current offering but instead uses Edwards elliptic curve cryptography, which relies on a different mathematical equation that is even more difficult to solve than RSA. “Looking forward, we are preparing a system that if you implement it and use it in the next five to 10 years, we can provide security immediately for our clients,” says Poola.


Another significant signal about the mystery of horizontal gene transfer. This is not a bug or an accident but a key ‘affordance’ of living complex systems. It also challenges the idea of what sort of change is ‘transgenically’ natural and what’s not.
Recent studies of a range of animals — other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals — point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.

DNA Jumps Between Animal Species. No One Knows How Often.

The discovery of a gene shared by two unrelated species of fish is the latest evidence that horizontal gene transfers occur surprisingly often in vertebrates.
To survive in the frigid ocean waters around the Arctic and Antarctica, marine life evolved many defenses against the lethal cold. One common adaptation is the ability to make antifreezing proteins (AFPs) that prevent ice crystals from growing in blood, tissues and cells. It’s a solution that has evolved repeatedly and independently, not just in fish but in plants, fungi and bacteria.

It isn’t surprising, then, that herrings and smelts, two groups of fish that commonly roam the northernmost reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, both make AFPs. But it is very surprising, even weird, that both fish do so with the same AFP gene — particularly since their ancestors diverged more than 250 million years ago and the gene is absent from all the other fish species related to them.

A March paper in Trends in Genetics holds the unorthodox explanation: The gene became part of the smelt genome through a direct horizontal transfer from a herring. It wasn’t through hybridization, because herring and smelt can’t crossbreed, as many failed attempts have shown. The herring gene made its way into the smelt genome outside the normal sexual channels.

Even if transmissible elements are sometimes dismissed as “junk” DNA, they can have dramatic impacts. Transposable elements are “the most exciting, dynamic and potentially influential sector of the genome,” said Schaack, especially because they represent “an internal source of mutagenesis in every genome.” Not only do they alter DNA when they’re pasted in, but because they consist of repetitive sequences, their very presence increases the likelihood of genetic recombination.


Plant socialality may be a more widespread phenomena - than simply cooperating-competing in an ecological niche.

These ferns may be the first plants known to share work like ants

The plants may form a type of communal lifestyle never seen outside of the animal kingdom
High in the forest canopy, a mass of strange ferns grips a tree trunk, looking like a giant tangle of floppy, viridescent antlers. Below these fork-leaved fronds and closer into the core of the lush knot are brown, disk-shaped plants. These, too, are ferns of the very same species.

The ferns — and possibly similar plants — may form a type of complex, interdependent society previously considered limited to animals like ants and termites, researchers report online May 14 in Ecology. 

Kevin Burns, a biologist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, first became familiar with the ferns while conducting fieldwork on Lord Howe Island, an isolated island between Australia and New Zealand. He happened to take note of the local epiphytes — plants that grow upon other plants — and one species particularly caught his attention: the staghorn fern (Platycerium bifurcatum), also native to parts of mainland Australia and Indonesia.

The shrubby apparatus reminded Burns of a termite mound, with a communal store of resources and the segregation of different jobs in the colony. Scientists call these types of cooperative groups, where overlapping generations live together and form castes to divide labor and reproductive roles, “eusocial.” The term has been used to describe certain insect and crustacean societies, along with two mole rat species as the only mammalian examples. Burns wondered if the ferns could also be eusocial.


We have made such tremendous advances in understanding the human brain and the connectome - it is easy to think we are close to a full understanding - this is a small signal of the tremendous distance we have yet to go.

A deep look at a speck of human brain reveals never-before-seen quirks

Extra-strong connections, whorled tendrils and symmetrical cells hint at deep brain mysteries
A new view of the human brain shows its cellular residents in all their wild and weird glory. The map, drawn from a tiny piece of a woman’s brain, charts the varied shapes of 50,000 cells and 130 million connections between them.

This intricate map, named H01 for “human sample 1,” represents a milestone in scientists’ quest to provide evermore detailed descriptions of a brain

Scientists at Harvard University, Google and elsewhere prepared and analyzed the brain tissue sample. Smaller than a sesame seed, the bit of brain was about a millionth of an entire brain’s volume. It came from the cortex — the brain’s outer layer responsible for complex thought — of a 45-year-old woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy. After it was removed, the brain sample was quickly preserved and stained with heavy metals that revealed cellular structures. The sample was then sliced into more than 5,000 wafer-thin pieces and imaged with powerful electron microscopes.

Computational programs stitched the resulting images back together and artificial intelligence programs helped scientists analyze them. A short description of the resulting view was published as a preprint May 30 to bioRxiv.org. The full dataset is freely available online.


I keep imagining that just over 100 years ago Einstein changed physics - and ushered in a new world of light-matter. The basic science emerging today makes me wonder what magical alchemy will be commonplace in 2121. 

Particle seen switching between matter and antimatter at CERN

Antimatter is kind of the “evil twin” of normal matter, but it’s surprisingly similar – in fact, the only real difference is that antimatter has the opposite charge. That means that if ever a matter and antimatter particle come into contact, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy.

To complicate things, some particles, such as photons, are actually their own antiparticles. Others have even been seen to exist as a weird mixture of both states at the same time, thanks to the quantum quirk of superposition (illustrated most famously through the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat.) That means that these particles actually oscillate between being matter and antimatter.

And now, a new particle has joined that exclusive club – the charm meson. This subatomic particle is normally made up of a charm quark and an up antiquark, while its antimatter equivalent consists of a charm antiquark and an up quark. Normally those states are kept separate, but the new study shows that charm mesons can spontaneously switch between the two.


From the every smaller to as large as we have been able to scan - more challenges to our fundamental understandings.

An arc of galaxies 3 billion light-years long may challenge cosmology

The discovery is a “big deal” if true, but still needs to be confirmed
A giant arc of galaxies appears to stretch across more than 3 billion light-years in the distant universe. If the arc turns out to be real, it would challenge a bedrock assumption of cosmology: that on large scales, matter in the universe is evenly distributed no matter where you look.

“It would overturn cosmology as we know it,” said cosmologist Alexia Lopez at a June 7 news conference at the virtual American Astronomical Society meeting. “Our standard model, not to put it too heavily, kind of falls through.”

Lopez, of the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England, and colleagues discovered the purported structure, which they call simply the Giant Arc, by studying the light of about 40,000 quasars captured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Quasars are the luminous cores of giant galaxies so distant that they appear as points of light. While en route to Earth, some of that light gets absorbed by atoms in and around foreground galaxies, leaving specific signatures in the light that eventually reaches astronomers’ telescopes.


Another strong signal of the emerging phase transition in energy geopolitics and a strong use case for hydrogen fuel cells.

GM batteries and hydrogen fuel cells to be adapted for low-carbon trains

As it eyes the future of sustainable transport through the development of advanced batteries and hydrogen fuel cell technologies, General Motors is now expanding these ambitions to include the world of freight. The automaker has entered a new agreement with rail technology outfit Wabtec to develop new eco-friendly powertrains for locomotives, building on the company's recent groundbreaking moves in the area.

Last month, Wabtec showed off the world's first battery-electric locomotive, which was demonstrated as part of a hybrid system that cut diesel use of the entire vehicle by 11 percent. The company is looking to build on its early success with a bigger and better version it says could can fuel consumption and carbon emissions by up to 30 percent, and which could enter use in the coming years.

It will now have access to GM's expertise in powertrain technology as it pushes ahead with its vision. The pair will work together to develop train-oriented versions of GM's Ultium battery technology, which will underpin the forthcoming all-electric Hummer, and its Hydrotec hydrogen fuel cell power cubes.


And this is a good signal about an enhancement of our we harvest solar energy.

Solar makes a lot of sense at ground level, too

Solar projects that support native grasses can sequester more carbon than farmland alone.
Minnesota and Iowa used to be home to an estimated 25 million acres of tallgrass prairie. Due to agriculture, these ecologically diverse habitats are almost functionally extinct, as barely 1% of those tallgrass acres remain. From an emissions-capturing standpoint, these native grassland habitats are important because they sequester almost 60% more carbon per acre than modern agricultural activities.

researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and the University of Minnesota analyzed solar power facilities that integrate natural grasses.

The study modeled and averaged solar facilities in seven states in the Upper Midwest. Their modeling suggests that native grasses planted as part of 10 GW of solar generation capacity would sequester 129.3 tons of carbon per hectare; that is 65% and 35% greater than either an agriculture or a solar-turfgrass scenario, respectively.

The researchers said that this volume of emission sequestration is equivalent to the emission savings of 5,000 GWh of fossil generation shifting to solar power, which would correspond to greater than 3 GW of solar capacity.



#micropoem




The lineage of baggage -
 our inherited baggage -
is not our fault - 
it pre-seeded us - 
living-out of us -
until we - 
become aware that life -
can be different - 
and start wayfinding -
 instead of navigating -
with a map of a given world -


Discounting narratives -
as 'conspiracy theories' -
misdirects attention -

there are real conspiracies -
tobacco - oil - climate change -

magical thinking -
can give coherent social causes -
to the ills of now -

conspiracies are a reality -
while magic isn't -


experience Is ever changing -
pain-to-pleasure-turns-indifference -
flown-chaotic -
to be alive is to -
anticipate changes -
required to enact-state-as-change -
life is an attractor of active -
homeostating-fluency -
to be is to be changing -
no changing - no be-ing

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