Thursday, August 5, 2021

Friday Thinking 6 Aug 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





Say the word “internet” these days, and most people will call to mind images of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, of Google and Twitter: sprawling, intrusive, unaccountable. This tiny handful of vast tech corporations and their distant CEOs demand our online attention and dominate the offline headlines. 

But 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.

Introducing the Public Interest Internet





Although uncertainty presents a persistent headache for central bankers and investors, it has a longstanding place in economic theory. Frank Knight, progenitor of the Chicago School of economics in the 1920s, famously distinguished between risk and uncertainty. While risk could and should be priced in to routine economic activity, Knight thought, only the heroic entrepreneur could steer his business through the shoals of uncertainty in economic life. Profits—otherwise hard to explain within neoclassical theory—were the entrepreneur’s reward. Two decades later, Knight’s friend Friedrich Hayek made a similar argument from the other end of the stick: given the deep imponderables and complexities of economic affairs, the government had better stick to the sidelines. The unifying message was that economic experimentation should be left to private actors, who alone could assume the personal responsibility of uncertainty.

John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, suggested that it was precisely this inescapable uncertainty that led market participants to favor liquid assets, tilting economies against what neoclassical theory held was a “natural” tendency toward full employment. Correcting the distortion, Keynes thought, required state-led management of aggregate demand, not least for the stability and predictability it would provide. Even in Keynes’s case, though, uncertainty was a disquieting reality to be soberly accommodated rather than embraced.

There is one economist from the last century who would have felt rather at home in our moment of uncertainty, however. If any life’s work could be summed up by the mantra “We don’t know, but let’s give it a try,” it was that of Albert O. Hirschman, one of the most prominent and original social scientists of the second half of the twentieth century. 

Hirschman theorized a uniquely pragmatic approach to economic management that took surprises for granted—quite unlike the macroeconomics of today. In an era when “crisis” rather than “equilibrium” seems the more obvious tendency of the system, the fascinating experiments of both his life and work may yet have something to teach us.

We Don't Know, But Let's Try It




Stupidity is a very specific cognitive failing. Crudely put, it occurs when you don’t have the right conceptual tools for the job. The result is an inability to make sense of what is happening and a resulting tendency to force phenomena into crude, distorting pigeonholes.

This is easiest to introduce with a tragic case. British high command during the First World War frequently understood trench warfare using concepts and strategies from the cavalry battles of their youth. As one of Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s subordinates later remarked, they thought of the trenches as ‘mobile operations at the halt’: ie, as fluid battle lines with the simple caveat that nothing in fact budged for years. Unsurprisingly, this did not serve them well in formulating a strategy: they were hampered, beyond the shortage of material resources, by a kind of ‘conceptual obsolescence’, a failure to update their cognitive tools to fit the task in hand.

Stupidity will often arise in cases like this, when an outdated conceptual framework is forced into service, mangling the user’s grip on some new phenomenon. It is important to distinguish this from mere error. We make mistakes for all kinds of reasons. Stupidity is rather one specific and stubborn cause of error. 

Stupidity is … rather a lack of the necessary means, a lack of the necessary intellectual equipment. Combatting it will typically require not brute willpower but the construction of a new way of seeing our self and our world.

Why some of the smartest people can be so very stupid




In Dune, there exist concentrations of events in the future that its clairvoyant beings cannot see past. That the density of entanglement of events can’t be separated to see future consequences.

It’s such a fascinating idea that you can write up an entire sci-fi novel on the idea that quantum computers can become clairvoyant oracles.

The singularities of cognition, where non-intuitionistic logic originates from, are analogous to a kind of inference that C.S. Peirce identified 100 years ago. He conjured up a terrible neologism, which he called abduction.

The business of abduction involves the identification of the patterns that we can observe and extrapolating these to wider domains. It is not the same as bending spacetime, but it’s very useful for predicting the future.

When we shut our minds out to the possibility of the enormous diversity and richness of reality, we see only the illusion of a world with absolute predictability. Hence a world without free will. A world that is absolutely monotonous. A world without variety and surprise. Hence we should not fear change but embrace it because it is what makes us human.

The Spice Melange and Free Will





This is a very interesting signal in a shift toward more appropriate policies by major powers to coordinate responses to climate change.

Energy Guru Is ‘Beyond’ Disappointed With Dwindling U.S. Infrastructure Plan

For almost two decades the U.S. author and climate activist Jeremy Rifkin has advised governments in Europe and China on how to retool their economies for what he calls a third industrial revolution. But never his own.

That seemed to change lately, allowing Rifkin to dream of aligning the digital policies and energy infrastructure of the world’s economic superpowers, a goal he says could one day see electricity traded across continents and help reduce geopolitical tensions.Rifkin met seven times in recent years with now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to discuss his ideas. That included a dinner Schumer hosted at a Capitol Hill restaurant in July 2019 to persuade seven other Democratic Party senators to support a big ticket reinvention of American infrastructure.Alongside a team that included construction multinational Black & Veatch and Chicago’s Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Rifkin also wrote a 242-page, 20-year, $16 trillion strategy for Schumer on how the U.S. could reboot productivity growth while meeting climate targets.

At least one proposal that the report’s authors claim as original — to bury a new high voltage direct current grid under federal highways and railways — also appeared in the American Jobs Plan that President Joe Biden unveiled in March, though it's hard to identify the source of any one idea in the sausage-making of legislation.

Rifkin’s blueprint “underscores the need to pass big, bold solutions to address climate change through investments in our infrastructure,” Schumer said in a written response to questions. The report, accessible here, was held private until now.


All models are wrong - but some are useful - and most importantly models can be made better because they help reveal errors in assumptions and calculations. This article doesn’t reduce the challenges of climate change - but does warn us about the differences between modeling reality versus modeling databases. We are learning much the same sort of patience in developing our knowledge of Covid.

U.N. climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming

Next month, after a yearlong delay because of the pandemic, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will begin to release its first major assessment of human-caused global warming since 2013. The report, the first part of which will appear on 9 August, will drop on a world that has starkly changed in 8 years, warming by more than 0.3°C to nearly 1.3°C above preindustrial levels. Weather has grown more severe, seas are measurably higher, and mountain glaciers and polar ice have shrunk sharply. And after years of limited action, many countries, pushed by a concerned public and corporations, seem willing to curb their carbon emissions.

But as climate scientists face this alarming reality, the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models, which in other respects are more powerful and trustworthy than their predecessors, into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Ahead of each major IPCC report, the world’s climate modeling centers run a set of scenarios for the future, calculating how different global emissions paths will alter the climate. These raw results, compiled in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), then feed directly into the IPCC report. The results live on as other scientists use them to assess the impacts of climate change, insurance companies and financial institutions forecast effects on economies and infrastructure, and economists calculate the true cost of carbon emissions, says Jean-François Lamarque, a lead climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and CMIP’s new director. “This is not an ivory tower type of exercise.”


The world of microbes includes vast diversity in our soils - this is an important signal of how much the small things in life are vital.
“I have The Nature and Properties of Soils in front of me — the standard textbook,” said Gregg Sanford, a soil researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The theory of soil organic carbon accumulation that’s in that textbook has been proven mostly false … and we’re still teaching it.”
Major climate models such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on this outdated understanding of soil. Several recent studies indicate that those models are underestimating the total amount of carbon that will be released from soil in a warming climate.

A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.
over the past 10 years or so, soil science has undergone a quiet revolution, akin to what would happen if, in physics, relativity or quantum mechanics were overthrown. Except in this case, almost nobody has heard about it — including many who hope soils can rescue the climate. “There are a lot of people who are interested in sequestration who haven’t caught up yet,” said Margaret Torn, a soil scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

A new generation of soil studies powered by modern microscopes and imaging technologies has revealed that whatever humus is, it is not the long-lasting substance scientists believed it to be. Soil researchers have concluded that even the largest, most complex molecules can be quickly devoured by soil’s abundant and voracious microbes. The magic molecule you can just stick in the soil and expect to stay there may not exist.


But then - maybe the earth does swallow huge amounts of carbon. Perhaps a terraforming project could infuse carbon in the earth’s folds.
There are a number of ways for carbon to be released back to the atmosphere (as CO2) but there is only one path in which it can return to the Earth's interior: via plate subduction. Here, surface carbon, for instance in the form of seashells and micro-organisms which have locked atmospheric CO2 into their shells, is channeled into Earth's interior. 

Earth's interior is swallowing up more carbon than thought

Scientists from Cambridge University and NTU Singapore have found that slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates drag more carbon into Earth's interior than previously thought.

They found that the carbon drawn into Earth's interior at subduction zones—where tectonic plates collide and dive into Earth's interior—tends to stay locked away at depth, rather than resurfacing in the form of volcanic emissions.

Their findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that only about a third of the carbon recycled beneath volcanic chains returns to the surface via recycling, in contrast to previous theories that what goes down mostly comes back up.


Some good news related to the transformation of global energy geopolitics. 

The price of batteries has declined by 97% in the last three decades

To reduce global greenhouse gas emissions we need to shift towards a low-carbon energy system. Large reductions in the cost of renewable technologies such as solar and wind have made them cost-competitive with fossil fuels. But to balance these intermittent sources, and electrify our transport systems we also need low-cost energy storage. Lithium-ion batteries are the most commonly used.

In this article I show that lithium-ion battery cells have also seen an impressive price reduction. Since 1991, prices have fallen by around 97%. Prices fall by an average of 19% for every doubling of capacity. Even more promising is that this rate of reduction does not yet appear to be slowing down.


We are only at the beginning of creating forms of energy storage and the phase transition in energy geopolitics can likely bring unprecedented energy abundance.

Form Energy announces Iron-Air 100-hour storage battery

Officials with battery maker Form Energy have announced the development of the Iron-Air 100-hour storage battery—a battery meant to store electricity created from renewable sources such as solar and wind. As part of their announcement, they note that their new battery is based on iron, not lithium, and thus is much less expensive to produce.

The team at Form Energy describe their new battery as a multi-day energy storage system—one that can feed electricity to the grid for approximately 100 hours at a cost that is significantly lower than lithium-ion batteries.

The basic idea behind the iron-air battery is that it takes in oxygen and then uses it to convert iron inside the battery to rust, later converting it back to iron again. Converting back and forth between iron and rust allows the energy that is stored in the battery to be stored longer than conventional batteries.

The batteries are much too big and heavy for use in small applications (or cars)—each battery is approximately the size of a washing machine. Instead, they are meant to be hooked together in massive grids capable of storing enormous amounts of electricity for days at a time. Cells are stacked inside of a water-based, non-flammable electrolyte, which the company claims is similar to that used in standard AA batteries—the cells are made of iron and air electrodes.


A small signal of the trajectory of medical sensors and diagnosis that our mobile devices will enable.

Algorithm enables detection of anemia from smartphone photos of the inner eyelid

Anemia is a global public health problem that carries significant risk for mortality and morbidity, particularly among older adults, children and individuals with chronic conditions.

Diagnosis generally involves a complete blood count test. This requires specific lab equipment and trained personnel, including phlebotomists and technicians. Perhaps for this reason, anemia disproportionately affects individuals who live in rural environments, where access to health care is limited.

In response to the need for affordable, accessible and noninvasive point-of-care testing, researchers have developed an algorithm for anemia detection using an everyday technology: the smartphone camera.

The algorithm, evaluated in a study published in PLoS One, yielded an accuracy rate of 72.6% for detecting anemia using a photo of a patient’s lower eyelid.


Perpetual motion and energy seems like an eternal quest like the philosopher’s stone - but maybe there’s more to reality that we have yet to harness. Maybe the ‘heat death’ of the universe is not a foregone conclusion?
“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.

Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real

Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
In a preprint posted online Thursday night, researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.

A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.

Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.

The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state.



#micropoem



more wasted time - 
still no working f9 key - 
this effort to find a driver 
and get it working - 
it’s like operating -
in a dozen + - 
different standards of 
railway lines & tracks - and -
paying an exponential -
increase in transaction-costs - 


more wasted time - 
still no working f9 key - 
this effort to find a driver 
and get it working - 
it’s like operating -
in a dozen + - 
different standards of 
railway lines & tracks - and -
paying an exponential -
increase in transaction-costs - 
mhm - 
that’s why - 
DNA enables - 
flourishing diversities


It’s the beating heart -
of Harlequin - 

it’s not the love -
that frees you - 
it’s the possession -
that breaks you - 

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