Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) 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 will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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There is an urban legend (probably originating in an episode of Dragnet) about a gang of clothing store thieves whose modus operandi was to use a long stick to remove large numbers of clothes from racks at once, allowing them to rob stores very quickly. According to the urban legend, the gang was caught when one store, at the suggestion of a cop, arranged its clothes with alternate hangers facing opposite directions (see photograph below). This messed up the efficient de-racking and slowed the thieves down by forcing them to remove one hanger at a time.
The story illustrates a point that many don’t appreciate: productivity is politics. Organization is about adversaries vying for control of a system. The most important reason you should be interested in the topic of productivity (whether you favor GTD, 7 Habits, or KonMari) is not to get “organized” or “efficient” for its own sake (a recipe for runaway OCD), but to gain political control over your life. Otherwise you risk someone else taking control. There is no such thing as a "disorganized" state. Every state of organization is a means of control for somebody. If you don't know who that is, it probably isn't you. With automation and software, the question of who is benefitted by a particular pattern of organization (or apparent chaos) becomes even more critical. So in honor of Labor Day, here's a primer on the politics of productivity.
the moment you create a dimension of uniformity to save yourself learning, you also create an attack surface
To create legible organization is to assume nobody is working against you, or that you are powerful enough to control them through intimidation and fear.
The moment well-matched adversaries enter the picture, organization acquires a cost, and obfuscation of organization and chaos acquire value.
The weaker you are, the more obfuscated your organization must be to resist control. If you are really weak, you must actually behave chaotically, not just obfuscate order: give up efficiency for security.
We are entering an era where all algorithmically scalable work is gravitating to machines, and all emerging organization is designed to enable that migration.
Algorithmically unscalable work is what humans are valuable for. It involves slum-like rhizomatic patterns of organization and demands more political savvy to navigate.
The Politics of Productivity
the failure rate among Silicon Valley start-ups is 90 percent. Every member of the economics profession would be wise to memorize the previous figure, and repeat it daily. If so, economists might come closer to understanding why they’re mystified by what they deem slow economic growth. And mystified they are. So much so that they’ve apparently given up.
While the role of central banks (the Federal Reserve the world's #1 employer of economists) in the economy is vastly overstated either way, it’s good to see a routinely incorrect profession realize that it is nearly always incorrect. The first step to healing is recognition of the problem, or something like that.
While central bankers plainly don’t understand what drives economic growth, they need to realize that what they do has little to do with growth as is. Lest they or readers forget, central banks project their always overstated and rapidly shrinking economic influence through antiquated banks; banks arguably the least dynamic sources of credit in the world, and surely the least dynamic in the U.S. Going back to the Silicon Valley stat that begins this piece, does any sane person think banks have anything to do with the finance that drives this hotbed of innovation? This is a short way of saying that even if central bank economists actually had a clue, their doings would have little relevance to the economic sectors that actually power growth.
It’s also worth pointing out that Silicon Valley dynamism is likely not being captured by GDP, and other dopey numbers that central bankers follow. To understand the previous point, readers might consider how the 19th century introduction of coal as a source of fuel multiplied the productivity of workers twenty times over. And this was coal. Imagine what technological advances like the computer, internet, smartphone, and the GPS that is standard in modern smartphones have meant for individual productivity.
economists would be wise to memorize the stat about Silicon Valley because it might turn on a light where there’s presently darkness. The most prosperous region in the world, one where economic growth is abundant, is defined by near constant failure. Here’s the reason why economists don’t get growth. They don’t see that the quickest path to it is experimentation, realization of information (good and bad) through experimentation, and the release of precious resources back into the marketplace when experiments fail. Silicon Valley succeeds a lot precisely because it fails a lot. Its “recessions” are the source of its strength, yet economists think the path to growth involves fighting recession
The Path to Economic Growth Is An Absence of Economists
….electricity triumphed only when factories themselves were reconfigured. The driveshafts were replaced by wires, the huge steam engine by dozens of small motors. Factories spread out, there was natural light. Stripped of the driveshafts, the ceilings could be used to support pulleys and cranes. Workers had responsibility for their own machines; they needed better training and better pay. The electric motor was a wonderful invention, once we changed all the everyday details that surrounded it.
...in 1990 that what was true of electric motors might also prove true of computers: that we had yet to see the full economic benefits because we had yet to work out how to reshape our economy to take advantage of them. Later research by economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Lorin Hitt backed up the idea: they found that companies that had merely invested in computers in the 1990s had seen few benefits, but those that had also reorganised — decentralising, outsourcing and customising their products — had seen productivity soar.
If the fourth industrial revolution delivers on its promise, what lies ahead? Super-intelligent AI, perhaps? Killer robots? Telepathy: Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, is on the case. Nanobots that live in our blood, zapping tumours? Perhaps, finally, Rachael? The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains.
What We Get Wrong About Technology
This is a great article about the power and potential of the blockchain with some great examples including one by Wallmart using it for food safety. For anyone who is unsure of what distributed ledger technology signals - this is a must read.
Why Big Business Is Racing to Build Blockchains
Even if the craze for Bitcoin and Ethereum abates, the power of the “blockchain” tech behind those currencies is very real. Here’s how businesses are trying to harness it—and why they can’t afford to ignore it.
Established venture capital firms like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, and Union Square Ventures are pouring millions of dollars into cryptocurrency hedge funds. The topic is all the rage on Wall Street. But notably, the long-betting investors in this space see today’s numismatic delirium as a distraction. “Right now it’s much easier to get more focused on the short-term ICO money stuff,” says Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “I think this unfortunately overshadows the more important technology story.”
That story goes like this: Underneath the crypto-hysteria is a grand innovation in the humble realm of accounting. The most bullish acolytes of this electronic book-balancing breakthrough, Dixon included, hold that token-based projects will anchor the web’s next revolution, spawning crowdfunded businesses and services that deliver more value to their users while being less dependent on advertisers or rent-seeking middlemen.
Blockchain boosters say its development is one that rivals, in significance, the invention of double-entry bookkeeping. That’s the revolutionary method of tabulating assets and liabilities that emerged in Renaissance Italy and that, according to some historians, put wind in the sails of capitalism, allowing investors and entrepreneurs to team up in corporations and launch merchant ships beyond the horizon in search of commercial success. Blockchains, in this analogy, are triple-entry bookkeeping, where the third entry is a verifiable cryptographic receipt of any transaction.
Here’s another simple account of the blockchain and a list of potential applications - from the Economist.
IF BLOCKCHAINS RAN THE WORLD DISRUPTING THE TRUST BUSINESS
The trust business is little noticed but huge. Startups deploying blockchain technology threaten to disrupt it, and much else besides
WE LIKE lists because we don’t want to die.” What Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, said about human beings applies even more to the institutions they create. Without lists that keep track of people and things, most big organisations would collapse.
Lists range from simple checklists to complex databases, but they all have one major drawback: we must trust their keepers. Administrators hold the power. They can doctor corporate accounts, delete titles from land registries or add names to party rolls. To stop the keepers from going rogue, and catch them if they do, society has come to rely on all sorts of tools, from audits to supervisory boards. Together, list-keepers and those who watch them form one of the world’s biggest and least noticed industries, the trust business.
Now imagine a parallel universe in which lists have declared independence: they maintain themselves. This, broadly, is the promise of the “blockchain”, the system which underlies bitcoin, a digital currency, and similar “distributed-ledger” technologies. If blockchains take over, as fans are sure they will, what are the implications of the trust business migrating into the ether?
And another signal in a rapidly growing list of initiatives transforming our concepts of currency and accounting.
Besides eliminating the need for a traditional financial institution to mediate transactions, they provide a means for creating and securely storing a digital form of identification that can’t be corrupted and is easily accessible from anywhere. That’s why the United Nations is exploring using the technology in its effort to bring legal identification to the more than one billion people who don’t have official documents.
How Blockchain Is Kickstarting the Financial Lives of Refugees
Finland’s digital money system for asylum seekers shows what blockchain technology can offer the unbanked.
For a refugee in a new country, identity—at least in the official sense—can be among the hardest things to recover. And without an official ID it is nearly impossible to advance in society.
Finland, which like many European nations has recently seen a large influx of asylum seekers, is using a cryptographic ledger called blockchain to help them get on their feet faster.
For two years the Finnish Immigration Service has been giving asylum seekers who don’t have bank accounts prepaid Mastercards instead of the traditional cash disbursements, and today the program has several thousand active cardholders. Developed by the Helsinki-based startup MONI, the card is also linked to a unique digital identity stored on a blockchain, the same technology that underpins the digital currency Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has demonstrated how blockchain technology can be used to transmit value between individuals without the need for corporate middlemen. Core to the technology is a software protocol that creates a permanent record of every single Bitcoin transaction. Anyone can access this record, called the blockchain, by downloading the Bitcoin software. Computers running the software all over the world maintain the blockchain, and use it to verify new transactions.
Most importantly, a MONI account functions like a bank account, removing a major barrier to gaining employment. People can use their accounts to buy things, pay bills, and even receive direct deposits from employers. Meanwhile, every transaction is recorded in a public, virtually incorruptible database maintained by a decentralized global network of computers. That enables the Immigration Service to keep track of the cardholders and their spending.
MONI’s technology uses one of a number of public blockchains as the means of transferring value—but in a way that to the users seems like using a debit card. A cardholder can pay for things at Mastercard terminals, or enter a number into a Web form to make payments online. MONI takes care of the cryptographic handshake necessary to execute the digital currency transaction as well as the conversion from digital currency back to fiat currency.
This is a strong signal of the emerging transformation of print media - whether it be for journalism, science, business or education - the flat world of human writer crafted text - is moving toward a programmable interface to an immersive and interactive knowledge experience. Anyone interested in knowledge and information management should be paying attention. The examples included in the article are MUST SEE.
This is what McLuhan meant when he noted that when we are confronted with information overload - we must shift to pattern recognition.
The Journalist-Engineer
Lately, some of the best articles in the NY Times and Bloomberg are 99% code. The end-product is predominantly software, not prose.
Several years ago, this article might have been a few thousand words. There’d be tables and charts. They’d reference academic studies and correlate the data with something like unemployment.
This example is different. It’s a well-designed data dump. It’s raw numbers without any abstractions. There’s no attachment to the news cycle. There’s no traditional thesis. It cannot be made in Photoshop or Illustrator. You must write software.
It represents the present-day revolution within news organizations. Some call it data journalism. Or explorable explanations. Or interactive storytelling. Whatever the label, it’s a huge shift from ledes and infographics.
The story is the code. It depicts the yield curve, an incredibly complex system, in all of its glory. It’s an amazing piece of software (I bet financial companies would even buy it).
This is something for the Creepybook file - but it is a signal for an inevitable consequence of the digital environment. There was a time - when there was no ‘private self’ - no sense of anonymity.
Facebook Figured Out My Family Secrets, And It Won't Tell Me How
Rebecca Porter and I were strangers, as far as I knew. Facebook, however, thought we might be connected. Her name popped up this summer on my list of “People You May Know,” the social network’s roster of potential new online friends for me.
The People You May Know feature is notorious for its uncanny ability to recognize who you associate with in real life. It has mystified and disconcerted Facebook users by showing them an old boss, a one-night-stand, or someone they just ran into on the street.
These friend suggestions go far beyond mundane linking of schoolmates or colleagues. Over the years, I’d been told many weird stories about them, such as when a psychiatrist told me that her patients were being recommended to one another, indirectly outing their medical issues.
What makes the results so unsettling is the range of data sources—location information, activity on other apps, facial recognition on photographs—that Facebook has at its disposal to cross-check its users against one another, in the hopes of keeping them more deeply attached to the site. People generally are aware that Facebook is keeping tabs on who they are and how they use the network, but the depth and persistence of that monitoring is hard to grasp. And People You May Know, or “PYMK” in the company’s internal shorthand, is a black box.
To try to get a look into that black box—and the unknown and apparently aggressive data collection that feeds it—I began downloading and saving the list of people Facebook recommended to me, to see who came up, and what patterns might emerge.
This is another technical signal in the ‘Moore’s Law is Dead - Long live Moore’s Law’ - not so much as a new computing paradigm - but for the increasing capacity to design and implement microprocessors that can be customized for certain functions and ultimately for certain types of software - algorithmic intelligence.
Intel Announces Movidius Myriad X VPU, Featuring ‘Neural Compute Engine’
Today, Intel subsidiary Movidius is announcing the Movidius Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU), a low-power system-on-chip (SoC) intended for deep learning and AI acceleration in vision-based devices such as drones, smart cameras, and VR/AR headsets. This follows up on last month’s launch of the Myriad 2 powered Movidius Neural Compute Stick. As for the Myriad 2, the Myriad X will coexist alongside its predecessor, which was first announced in 2014. Movidius states that the Myriad X will offer ten times the performance of the Myriad 2 in deep neural network (DNN) inferencing within the same power envelope, while the Myriad 2 will remain a lower performance option.
Under the hood, the Myriad X SoC features what Movidius is calling a Neural Compute Engine, an on-chip DNN accelerator. With it, Movidius states that the Myriad X can achieve over one trillion operations per second (TOPS) of peak DNN inferencing throughput, in the backdrop of the Myriad X’s theoretical 4+ TOPS compute capability.
This is a great signal - the future of co-creation of our extended neural algorithmic intelligence. This is a signal of something beyond the Turing Test - but rather to co-learning environment of human-AI-ssistance.
training AI agents to excel at StarCraft II isn’t done just for glory’s sake. The idea is that an AI will be more capable of managing real-world tasks if it can successfully navigate a gaming environment that requires it to perform layers of computation while engaging a human agent. In that respect, today’s expert StarCraft II agent could be tomorrow’s AI cashier or customer service rep.
DeepMind is Teaching AIs How to Manage Real-World Tasks Through Gaming
Google's DeepMind Labs has partnered with Blizzard Entertainment to release an application program interface that enables artificial intelligence researchers to develop their own AI agents for playing StarCraft II. The hope is that the release will spur innovation in deep reinforcement learning and related areas of AI research.
Last year, Google’s DeepMind announced a partnership with Blizzard Entertainment to develop and test artificial intelligence (AI) agents in the popular real-time strategy game StarCraft II. Now, DeepMind has released a series of tools they’re calling StarCraft II Learning Environment (SC2LE) to test their agents against human competitors, as well as enable researchers to develop their own agents for the game.
“Testing our agents in games that are not specifically designed for AI research, and where humans play well, is crucial to benchmark agent performance,” DeepMind’s team wrote in a blog post. The large pool of online StarCraft II players will provide a huge variety of “extremely talented opponents” from which the AI can learn.
Details of DeepMind’s research were published in a paper alongside the released toolset, which includes a machine learning API; a dataset of game replays; an open source version of PySC2, the Python component SC2LE; and more.
This is another important signal of the emerging integration of bio-technology integration. The interface for human-computer-environment will soon become invisible.
ENGINEERS JUST CREATED A TINY ANTENNA, WHICH COULD BE USED FOR BRAIN IMPLANTS
Revolutionary antenna, hundreds of times smaller than existing models, could help shrink phones and satellites, and even make smart brain implants a real thing.
Researchers at Northeastern University have made a major advance in developing significantly smaller antennas, hundreds of times tinier than currently existing versions. The development is significant because, in a world in which virtually every piece of portable wireless communications technology has shrunk over time, antennas have stubbornly remained the same size.
“Current antennas are limited to large sizes, which are hard for many applications like bio-implantable, bio-injectable, and bio-ingestible antennas,” Nian Sun, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, told Digital Trends.
The antennas described by Sun and his colleagues are based on an entirely different design principle to the traditional ones currently used. Traditional antennas receive and transmit large electromagnetic waves, and have to remain a certain size to function with electromagnetic radiation. Northeastern’s new antennas, on the other hand, are designed for acoustic resonance, which have a wavelength thousands of times smaller than electromagnetic waves.
Understanding species-in-environment as a key unit of survival is hard enough to grasp - but understanding the gene-pool-environment mutualism as the foundation of dynamic ecology-niche-instantiations is even harder. From horizontal-gene-transfer to endogenesis evolution is emerging as ever more complex. This is another fascinating article signalling the change in biological and evolutionary paradigms.
The five big cats of the Panthera genus — leopards, tigers, snow leopards, lions and jaguars — interbred repeatedly during the millions of years since their species diverged. Such hybridizations turn out to be surprisingly common and important in animal species evolution.
And the process doesn’t end with speeding up evolution in a single species. Adaptive introgression can in turn contribute significantly to adaptive radiation, a process by which one species rapidly diversifies into a large variety of types, which then form new lineages that continue to adapt independently. The textbook case can be found in the great lakes of East Africa, which are home to hundreds upon hundreds of cichlid species, a type of fish that diversified in explosive bursts (on the evolutionary timescale) from common ancestors, largely in response to climatic and tectonic shifts in their environment. Today, cichlids vary widely in form, behavior and ecology — thanks in large part to introgressive hybridization.
Interspecies Hybrids Play a Vital Role in Evolution
Hybrids, once treated as biological misfits, have been the secret saviors of many animal species in trouble. Reconciling that truth with conservation policies poses a challenge for science.
In 2006, a hunter shot what he thought was a polar bear in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Closer examination, however, revealed brown patches on its white fur, uncharacteristically long claws and a slightly hunched back. The creature was in fact a hybrid, its mother a polar bear, its father a grizzly. Although this cross was known to be possible — the two species had mated in captivity before — this was the first documented case found in the wild. Since then, it has become clear that this was not an isolated incident. Conservationists and others worry that if climate change continues to drive grizzly bears into polar bear territory, such interbreeding will become more common and will devastate the polar bear population. Some have even proposed killing the hybrids in an effort to conserve the species.
But grizzlies and polar bears, as it turns out, have been mating since the species diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago. Polar bear genomes have retained mitochondrial DNA from ancient grizzly bears, and grizzlies have inherited genes from hybridizing with polar bears. “People worry that if they interbreed, polar bears will lose their beautiful white coats,” said Michael Arnold, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Georgia. “But the truth is these organisms have not been looking entirely like themselves for a long time now.”
“If this mixing is a common natural event,” he warned, “then killing hybrids to prevent them from mixing with the ‘pure’ parent genomes is not a management technique we should do lightly.” In fact, it may be that the genetic variation introduced by this kind of hybridization could save the polar bears, whose survival in the face of rising temperatures and melting ice may hinge on their ability to adapt to a rockier, less frozen habitat. Taking in some genes from grizzly bears is highly likely to be adaptive for polar bears, Arnold said, even though the results “won’t look exactly like a polar bear.”
One of my favorite areas of interest is the human microbiome - this is an interesting signal.
“We found things that are related to things people have seen before, we found things that are divergent, and we found things that are completely novel.”
99% of The Microbes in Our Own Bodies Are Still a Total Mystery to Science
...scientists took a close look at the DNA fragments circling in human blood to see what matched up with our current databases of life as we know it. They found that more than 99 percent of the DNA they found didn’t belong to lifeforms we currently know about.
The research actually started out as a study into better ways to predict the success of organ transplants – at the moment doctors use a tissue biopsy (and an uncomfortably large needle) to look for signs of organ rejection, but the Stanford scientists wanted to find a less intrusive method.
That led to an analysis of blood samples – from 188 patients in total – to see if the mix of patient and donor DNA could provide tell-tale signs of whether a transplant would succeed or fail.
It turns out it could, and the team published a paper in 2015 on those results. But they also discovered there was more to the story: of all the non-human DNA collected during the research, 99 percent of it didn’t match anything in existing genetic databases.
This is a fascinating signal discussing the role of mechanical forces even in microbiological (and genetic) environments. This is an important illumination of the concept of phase transition in many domains.
Jammed Cells Expose the Physics of Cancer
The subtle mechanics of densely packed cells may help explain why some cancerous tumors stay put while others break off and spread through the body.
In 1995, while he was a graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, the biomedical scientist Peter Friedl saw something so startling it kept him awake for several nights. Coordinated groups of cancer cells he was growing in his adviser’s lab started moving through a network of fibers meant to mimic the spaces between cells in the human body.
For more than a century, scientists had known that individual cancer cells can metastasize, leaving a tumor and migrating through the bloodstream and lymph system to distant parts of the body. But no one had seen what Friedl had caught in his microscope: a phalanx of cancer cells moving as one. It was so new and strange that at first he had trouble getting it published. “It was rejected because the relevance [to metastasis] wasn’t clear,” he said. Friedl and his co-authors eventually published a short paper in the journal Cancer Research.
Two decades later, biologists have become increasingly convinced that mobile clusters of tumor cells, though rarer than individual circulating cells, are seeding many — perhaps most — of the deadly metastatic invasions that cause 90 percent of all cancer deaths. But it wasn’t until 2013 that Friedl, now at Radboud University in the Netherlands, really felt that he understood what he and his colleagues were seeing. Things finally fell into place for him when he read a paper by Jeffrey Fredberg, a professor of bioengineering and physiology at Harvard University, which proposed that cells could be “jammed” — packed together so tightly that they become a unit, like coffee beans stuck in a hopper.
The paper appeared amid a growing recognition of the importance of mechanics, and not just genetics, in directing cell behavior, Fredberg said. “People had always thought that the mechanical implications were at the most downstream end of the causal cascade, and at the most upstream end are genetic and epigenetic factors,” he said. “Then people discovered that physical forces and mechanical events actually can be upstream of genetic events — that cells are very aware of their mechanical microenvironments.”
Another interesting signal - a must read - not only about bacteria - but about the fundamental nature of biological communication. One can imagine a sort of bacterial mind - or even further a sort of bio-ecology-mind at work. When we consider human dependence on a microbiome the challenge is to understand ourselves in new ways.
Biofilms appear to use electrically charged particles to organize and synchronize activities across large expanses. This electrical exchange has proved so powerful that biofilms even use it to recruit new bacteria from their surroundings, and to negotiate with neighboring biofilms for their mutual well-being.
“I think these are arguably the most important developments in microbiology in the last couple years,” said Ned Wingreen, a biophysicist who researches quorum sensing at Princeton. “We’re learning about an entirely new mode of communication.”
...chemicals enable communication only with cells that have specific receptors attuned to them, Wingreen noted. Potassium, however, seems to be part of a universal language shared by animal neurons, plant cells and — scientists are increasingly finding — bacteria.
Bacteria Use Brainlike Bursts of Electricity to Communicate
With electrical signals, cells can organize themselves into complex societies and negotiate with other colonies.
Bacteria have an unfortunate — and inaccurate — public image as isolated cells twiddling about on microscope slides. The more that scientists learn about bacteria, however, the more they see that this hermit like reputation is deeply misleading, like trying to understand human behavior without referring to cities, laws or speech. “People were treating bacteria as … solitary organisms that live by themselves,” said Gürol Süel, a biophysicist at the University of California, San Diego. “In fact, most bacteria in nature appear to reside in very dense communities.”
The preferred form of community for bacteria seems to be the biofilm. On teeth, on pipes, on rocks and in the ocean, microbes glom together by the billions and build sticky organic superstructures around themselves. In these films, bacteria can divide labor: Exterior cells may fend off threats, while interior cells produce food. And like humans, who have succeeded in large part by cooperating with each other, bacteria thrive in communities. Antibiotics that easily dispatch free-swimming cells often prove useless against the same types of cells when they’ve hunkered down in a film.
For Gemma Reguera, a microbiologist at Michigan State University, the recent revelations bolster an argument she has long been making to her biologist peers: that physical signals such as light, sound and electricity are as important to bacteria as chemical signals. “Perhaps [Süel’s finding] will help the scientific community and [people] outside the scientific community feel more open about other forms of physical communication” among bacteria, Reguera said.
Part of what excites researchers is that electrical signaling among bacteria shows signs of being more powerful than chemically mediated quorum sensing. Chemical signals have proved critical for coordinating certain collective behaviors, but they quickly get diluted and fade out once they’re beyond the immediate vicinity of the bacteria emitting the signal. In contrast, as Süel’s team has found, the potassium signals released from biofilms can travel with constant strength for more than 1,000 times the width of a typical bacterial cell — and even that limit is an artificial upper bound imposed by the microfluidic devices used in the experiments. The difference between quorum sensing and potassium signaling is like the difference between shouting from a mountaintop and making an international phone call.
This is an interesting site providing a glimpse into some people engaged in Augmented Reality experiments.
AR Experiments
AR Experiments is a site that features work by coders who are experimenting with augmented reality in exciting ways. These experiments use various tools like ARCore, an SDK that lets Android developers create awesome AR experiences. We’re featuring some of our favorite projects here to help inspire more coders to imagine what could be made with AR.
The acceleration of progress in renewable energy is bringing the phase transition in global energy geopolitics faster than many have imagined.
China eclipses Europe as 2020 solar power target is smashed
China has reached its 2020 solar power target three years ahead of schedule, after installed capacity topped well over its 105GW target. Europe has been urged to show similar ambition.
New figures published by solar industry firm Asia Europe Clean Energy (Solar) Advisory (AECEA) last week revealed that China has exceeded its 2020 target of 105GW of installed solar capacity, after new builds in June and July pushed it up beyond 112GW.
Solar power is enjoying a sunny 2017 in China, after the first half of this year saw capacity increased by 24.4GW, dwarfing similar efforts in Europe, and cementing China’s status as the world’s leading solar nation.
China is not planning to rest on its laurels either. Officials have recently tweaked its 2017 forecast for new solar installations and figures now suggest that total new capacity for this year could reach 45GW. In contrast, in 2016 Germany’s total capacity was 41.1GW.
This is fun and fascinating - the graphs are great.
This is How Canada Talks
Spread across a vast landmass, Canada’s roughly 30 million anglophones speak something called Canadian English. The stereotype often goes that Canadian English is a lot like American English in terms of both vocabulary and pronunciation, with significant influence from the British Isles, resulting in words like zed and spellings like colour and centre. A subtle Canadian accent that affects the vowels in words like about and write, and a collection of characteristic Canadian vocabulary like chesterfield, toque, poutine and bunnyhug, add to its uniqueness.
Wait, bunnyhug? Yes, bunnyhug is a very Canadian word (for a hooded sweatshirt), but you’ve probably never heard of it if you live outside of Saskatchewan. It turns out that there is a surprising amount of diversity within Canada when it comes to how we talk and the words we use. Of course, everyone knows about the characteristic English of Newfoundland, and regions like Cape Breton, Lunenberg and the Ottawa Valley also have unique ways of speaking. But even in other places that have no obvious reason to talk differently, Canadians have developed strong regionalisms.
