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In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st Century
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
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Quotes:
Articles:
While Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro denies that a serious public health crisis is underway, a small municipality an hour up the coast from Rio de Janeiro has instituted a remarkable and effective COVID-19 response. In Maricá, a city of 160,000, about 42,000 of the city’s lowest-income residents—who already receive 130 reals (R$), about $25, per month as part of the city’s expanded basic income—will now be paid R$300 per month ($60), 169 percent of the Brazilian poverty line, at least through June. End-of-year bonuses will be advanced to make April’s payment an even larger R$430 per person. Food baskets are also being distributed to families with children in the public school system, and additional support is being offered to small businesses and self-employed workers. The sums involved are not luxurious, but they represent the difference between catastrophe and the possibility to overcome the crisis for tens of thousands of Marica’s residents.
In addition to the basic income program, which has more than 42,000 monthly recipients, initiatives include savings accounts for high school students, free public transportation, massive infrastructure investments, and a sovereign wealth fund to lower costs of capital and guarantee social programs in perpetuity.
What a Solidarity Economy Looks Like
The only investment strategy, portfolio, or retirement planning any person needs is the following: Buy the stocks of firms that are unregulated monopolies and nothing else. I’ve followed this dictum for a decade, and it’s worked … well.
During the Great Recession, the luxury hotel brand had to cease all print advertising, as revenue per room had declined 25%. And a strange thing happened when demand returned: the absence of print marketing didn’t seem to make any difference. Multiply this phenomenon by a million, and you have what will happen over the next 6 months. Thousands of the biggest advertisers globally are about to use this forced abstinence from broadcast media (with business down 30-50%) to kick the habit, and never return.
Google goes sideways to up. Facebook sideways to down, as every lie they’ve told is a debt to the truth, and that debt is coming due. Libra is dead, and while they should be the primary platform at the epicenter of a vast state-sponsored virus tracing effort, they are not. It’s no accident the social media firm was excluded from Apple and Alphabet’s contact-tracing program.
Facebook used to sit with the cool kids at lunch, but word got out that he killed a dog, filmed it, and made a meme of it. Big tech is disarticulating, as one of these firms is not like the others. One of them is run by a sociopath whose fabric softener is to exploit his top executive's gender, personal loss, and engagement as a likability shield to drive shareholder value.
Stalin said one death is a tragedy, millions a statistic. Big tech (even Facebook) has stepped up and filled the void created by a level of federal incompetence that, on a smaller scale, would be deemed involuntary manslaughter. The Four are being solid citizens, and their employees are demonstrating grit and courage (e.g., Amazon warehouse workers). Unsurprisingly, big tech is using this cloud cover to lobby governors and legislators to delay and obfuscate regulation and antitrust.
The question we, and our elected officials, will face post corona is: Are big tech firms run by good people who have demonstrated admirable citizenship, or are they a threat to the ecosystem and should be broken up? The answer is yes.
Post Corona: The Four
While the intensity dimension can account for a range of dream varieties, it cannot account for some of the most interesting dream states. For example, amputees very often dream themselves intact. They might not experience the loss of their limb in dreams even years after the amputation, and even if the physical handicap was congenital. Similarly, dreams of the congenitally deaf-mute or those of the congenitally paraplegic cannot be distinguished from those of non-handicapped subjects. It is as if the dream has access to the whole dreamer who is a different person from the individual anchored in waking consciousness. Dream reports from deaf-mute individuals involve them talking and hearing normally. Patients with varying degrees of paraplegia report themselves flying, running, walking and swimming. The dream is accessing somebody different from the waking individual who is having the dream.
Our dreams have many purposes, changing across the lifespan
Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.
….It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.
...What would happen if we stopped acting as if the primordial form of work is laboring at a production line, or wheat field, or iron foundry, or even in an office cubicle, and instead started from a mother, a teacher, or a caregiver? We might be forced to conclude that the real business of human life is not contributing toward something called “the economy” (a concept that didn’t even exist three hundred years ago), but the fact that we are all, and have always been, projects of mutual creation.Labor, similarly, should be renegotiated. Submitting oneself to labor discipline—supervision, control, even the self-control of the ambitious self-employed—does not make one a better person. In most really important ways, it probably makes one worse. To undergo it is a misfortune that at best is sometimes necessary. Yet it’s only when we reject the idea that such labor is virtuous in itself that we can start to ask what is virtuous about labor. To which the answer is obvious. Labor is virtuous if it helps others. A renegotiated definition of productivity should make it easier to reimagine the very nature of what work is, since, among other things, it will mean that technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.
...Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes.
A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse - 2013
at Stanford, Knuth put aside The Art of Computer Programming for nearly a decade to develop TeX (pronounced “tech”), a sophisticated, game-changing program that put digital typography on a desktop computer. He made it open source, much to the benefit of professional mathematicians, computer scientists, economists, engineers, linguists, statisticians and anyone else who lacked technical symbols on their keyboards but understood the placement of complicated formulas better than their publishers. In a world of often ephemeral computer programs, TeX has endured as the gold standard for making scientific papers more beautiful and easier for experts to read and understand.
Knuth’s interest in storytelling also led him to develop a philosophy of literate programming — a method for writing computer programs as literary essays. A literate program intersperses source code with elegant prose written in a familiar language, such as English. The source code delivers functionality and efficiency, while the exposition addresses a human reader, rather than the computer’s compiler. Anyone who later updates or debugs a literate program will avoid the often time-consuming and costly problem of trying to understand the original programmer’s algorithms, design decisions and implementation strategies. Knuth is a computer scientist who understands that words matter.
A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.
I wrote a couple of books, including Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, that are about theology — things you can’t prove — rather than mathematics or computer science. My life would not be complete if it was all about cut and dried things. The mystical things I don’t understand give me humility. There are things beyond my understanding.
The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories
It’s sort of like how fish perceive the ocean as a smooth featureless fluid, even though the water is made of discrete tiny molecules….
In a hypergraph “there is not just one path of time; there are many paths, and many ‘histories,’” Wolfram writes. But one supposedly independent path of history can merge with another. “Even when the paths of history that are followed are different, these causal relationships can end up being the same — and that in effect, to an observer embedded in the system, there is still just a single thread of time.”
Wolfram’s hypergraph project aims for fundamental theory of physics
quote attributed to William James: ‘A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.’
A few Friday Thinking posts ago I posted work related to Modern Monetary Theory - The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the truth about nations with sovereign currency - they will never run out of currency - they don’t tax in order to be able to spend - they spend in order to be able to tax. Tax is a means of achieving policy goals - not a way of producing a government income.
Coronavirus has destroyed the myth of the deficit
No, federal government spending doesn’t have to be ‘paid for’. The crisis shows providing for our society is not a financial issue
Only a month ago, a stimulus bill of $2tn would have been unthinkable. Indignant deficit scolds would have asked how one planned to pay for it, and complained about burdening our grandchildren with debt and bankrupting our country. Bernie Sanders bent over backwards to explain how he was going to pay for a Green New Deal or Medicare for All. These programs don’t seem as expensive any more. Suddenly the government is planning “helicopter drops” of cash. Larry Kudlow, who relentlessly attacked the Obama stimulus during the global financial crisis, is touting the current stimulus as “the single largest Main Street assistance program in the history of the United States”.
Nobody is seriously asking how we are going to pay for this stimulus – and they shouldn’t. It took a global pandemic to explode the myth that federal government spending has to be “paid for”.
The Covid-19 crisis has clearly demonstrated what should have been obvious already: provisioning society – whether with food, disinfecting wipes, toilet paper or medical supplies – is not a financial issue. If we can’t produce enough masks, ventilators or food, finance will not help. Society’s capacity to produce real output is what limits its ability to provision itself. And this is precisely what the virus threatens, as workers stay home, supply chains break down and businesses shut their doors.
On the financial side, a sovereign government can always afford to buy what is for sale in its currency, as Modern Money Theorists have long explained. It cannot run out of money because it simply credits bank accounts when it spends. This is not a prescription, but merely a description of what actually happens. In the United States, Congress passes the budget, while the Treasury, in cooperation with its fiscal agent, the Federal Reserve, makes the necessary payments. This happens through the thick and thin of the business cycle, crisis or not. If the US government wants to buy more ventilators or masks, finance cannot be an impediment.
This is an interesting signal because …. Well it’s the 21st Century.
What Do Countries With The Best Coronavirus Responses Have In Common? Women Leaders
Looking for examples of true leadership in a crisis? From Iceland to Taiwan and from Germany to New Zealand, women are stepping up to show the world how to manage a messy patch for our human family. Add in Finland, Iceland and Denmark, and this pandemic is revealing that women have what it takes when the heat rises in our Houses of State. Many will say these are small countries, or islands, or other exceptions. But Germany is large and leading, and the UK is an island with very different outcomes. These leaders are gifting us an attractive alternative way of wielding power. What are they teaching us?
Generally, the empathy and care which all of these female leaders have communicated seems to come from an alternate universe than the one we have gotten used to. It’s like their arms are coming out of their videos to hold you close in a heart-felt and loving embrace. Who knew leaders could sound like this? Now we do.
It’s about time that organization become friendlier to virtual meetings - but security is always an issue. Here’s a signal of the current ‘favorite’ medium.
In general, Zoom's problems fall into three broad buckets: (1) bad privacy practices, (2) bad security practices, and (3) bad user configurations.
Doc Searls has been all over this, writing about the surprisingly large number of third-party trackers on the Zoom website and its poor privacy practices in general.
Security and Privacy Implications of Zoom
Over the past few weeks, Zoom's use has exploded since it became the video conferencing platform of choice in today's COVID-19 world. (My own university, Harvard, uses it for all of its classes. Boris Johnson had a cabinet meeting over Zoom.) Over that same period, the company has been exposed for having both lousy privacy and lousy security. My goal here is to summarize all of the problems and talk about solutions and workarounds.
Privacy first: Zoom spies on its users for personal profit. It seems to have cleaned this up somewhat since everyone started paying attention, but it still does it.
The company collects a laundry list of data about you, including user name, physical address, email address, phone number, job information, Facebook profile information, computer or phone specs, IP address, and any other information you create or upload. And it uses all of this surveillance data for profit, against your interests.
Zoom is a security and privacy disaster, but until now had managed to avoid public accountability because it was relatively obscure. Now that it's in the spotlight, it's all coming out. (Their 4/1 response to all of this is here.) On 4/2, the company said it would freeze all feature development and focus on security and privacy. Let's see if that's anything more than a PR move.
In the meantime, you should either lock Zoom down as best you can, or -- better yet -- abandon the platform altogether. Jitsi ( https://jitsi.org/ ) is a distributed, free, and open-source alternative. Start your meeting here ( https://meet.jit.si/ ).
This is an interesting signal of how cooperation may be more fundamental to evolution than competition (or at least of equal importance). An important message in the midst of a pandemic.
"We discovered that cells can work together to clean up their environment. As temperature increases, baker's yeast cells secrete glutathione to help each other replicate. Being an antioxidant, glutathione inactivates harmful chemicals such as reactive oxygen species produced at higher temperatures, which are damaging for cells. Yeast populations can avoid extinction at high temperatures by working together to produce enough glutathione to prevent damage."
"If enough yeast cells work together in a population, they have the ability to produce enough glutathione to cope with higher temperatures and so maintain a clean environment for themselves and their offspring. If there are not enough yeasts working together, then the population cannot accumulate enough glutathione, and will die out."
Microorganisms work together to survive high temperatures
The conventional view is that high temperatures cause microorganisms to replicate slowly or die. In this current textbook view, microorganisms combat heat-induced damage on their own. Reporting in Nature Microbiology, Delft researchers Diederik Laman Trip and Hyun Youk demonstrate that microorganisms (in this case baker's yeast) can actually work together and help each other and their future generations survive and replicate at high temperatures.
The paper reports the first discovery of a natural, cooperative strategy used by an organism to survive high temperatures. Laman Trip and Youk developed experiments and a mathematical model revealing that yeasts help each other and their future generations to replicate, survive and avoid becoming extinct at temperatures previously considered too high for survival—above 40 degrees C.
This is a early signal of the possibility of a greater domestication of bacteria as a manufacturing paradigm, for energy and materials and a metabolic economy.
New ethane-munching microbes discovered at hot vents
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen have discovered a microbe that feeds on ethane at deep-sea hot vents. With a share of up to 15%, ethane is the second-most common component of natural gas. The researchers also succeeded in cultivating this microbe in the laboratory. Notably, the mechanism by which it breaks down ethane is reversible. In the future, these microbes could be used to produce ethane as an energy source. The study has now been published in the journal mBio.
Some natural gas components such as propane or butane can be broken down by bacteria alone. According to the present state of research, however, degrading the main components of natural gas—methane and ethane—requires two organisms that form a consortium: Archaea, which break down the natural gas, and bacteria, which couple the electrons released in the process to sulfate, an abundant compound in the ocean. Studying the biochemical processes in the consortia in the laboratory has been extremely challenging up to now. These organisms grow very slowly and only divide every few months. Thus, little biomass was available for study.
The researchers also discovered that the ethane degradation of this microbe is reversible. Thus, relatives of Ethanoperedens could produce ethane from carbon dioxide. This is highly interesting for biotechnological applications. Wegener's team is now searching for such organisms. In addition, in cooperation with colleagues, they aim to convert microbes that produce methane into ethane producers.
Here’s a weak signal of the possible emergence of a metabolic economy.
it's possible to use iron nanoparticles to help turn black plastic (one of the most difficult types to recycle) into carbon nanotubes in a matter of moments. We were then able to use this new material to build electrical components such as data cables to transmit information to a speaker system to play music.
Plastic pollution: Chemical recycling could provide a solution
...many plastics are not recyclable in our current system. And even those that are recyclable still go to landfill eventually.
Plastics cannot be recycled infinitely, at least not using traditional techniques. Most are only given one new lease of life before they end up in the earth, the ocean or an incinerator. But there is hope in a different form of recycling known as chemical recycling.
Traditional physical or mechanical recycling typically grinds down plastic into smaller parts that are then mixed and molded together to create lower grade plastic products. Chemical recycling, on the other hand, breaks the plastic down to the molecular level, making available "platform molecules" that can then be used to make other materials. It's early days for this idea but, in principle, it could open up a whole range of opportunities.
Key to a metabolic economy is creating materials that are designed to be metabolized easily and safely.
Water replaces toxins: Green production of plastics
Many common materials are not sustainable. Some are harmful to plants or animals, others contain rare elements that will not always be as readily available as they are today. A great hope for the future is to achieve different material properties by using novel organic molecules. Organic high-performance materials containing only common elements such as carbon, hydrogen or oxygen could solve our resource problem—but their preparation is usually anything but environmentally friendly. Often very toxic substances are used during the synthesis of such materials, even if the end product itself is non-toxic.
At TU Wien a different approach is taken: In the research group for organic high-performance materials, led by Prof. Miriam Unterlass at the Faculty of Technical Chemistry at TU Wien, a completely different synthetic method is employed. Instead of toxic additives, only hot water is used. A decisive breakthrough has now been achieved: two important classes of polymers could be generated using the new process—an important step towards industrial application of the new method. The results have now been published in the renowned journal Angewandte Chemie.
3D printing has been a classic example of underperforming in the short term and continues to promise revolution (phase transition) in the long term.
This is a good signal of the long term.
"Strong and tough steels have tremendous applications but the strongest ones are usually expensive—the one exception being martensitic steels that are relatively inexpensive, costing less than a dollar per pound," said Dr. Ibrahim Karaman, Chevron Professor I and head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "We have developed a framework so that 3-D printing of these hard steels is possible into any desired geometry and the final object will be virtually defect-free."
Researchers uncover the art of printing extremely hard steels flawlessly
For millennia, metallurgists have been meticulously tweaking the ingredients of steel to enhance its properties. As a result, several variants of steel exist today; but one type, called martensitic steel, stands out from its steel cousins as stronger and more cost-effective to produce. Hence, martensitic steels naturally lend themselves to applications in the aerospace, automotive and defense industries, among others, where high-strength, lightweight parts need to be manufactured without boosting the cost.
However, for these and other applications, the metals have to be built into complex structures with minimal loss of strength and durability. Researchers from Texas A&M University, in collaboration with scientists in the Air Force Research Laboratory, have now developed guidelines that allow 3-D printing of martensitic steels into very sturdy, defect-free objects of nearly any shape.
A signal of an acceleration of the use of solar energy and the transformation of energy geopolitics.
"Rooftop solar has a conversion efficiency of between 15 and 20%," Jacek said.
"The semi-transparent cells have a conversion efficiency of 17%, while still transmitting more than 10% of the incoming light, so they are right in the zone. It's long been a dream to have windows that generate electricity, and now that looks possible."
"These solar cells mean a big change to the way we think about buildings and the way they function. Up until now every building has been designed on the assumption that windows are fundamentally passive. Now they will actively produce electricity.
Research: A solar window will soon do the same job as a standard rooftop solar panel
Semi-transparent solar cells that can be incorporated into window glass are a "game-changer" that could transform architecture, urban planning and electricity generation, Australian scientists say in a paper in Nano Energy.
The researchers—led by Professor Jacek Jasieniak from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science (Exciton Science) and Monash University—have succeeded in producing next-gen perovskite solar cells that generate electricity while allowing light to pass through. They are now investigating how the new technology could be built into commercial products with Viridian Glass, Australia's largest glass manufacturer.
This technology will transform windows into active power generators, potentially revolutionizing building design. Two square meters of solar window, the researchers say, will generate about as much electricity as a standard rooftop solar panel.
And water - the worry about water.
"What's particularly nice about this system is that all the materials are eco-friendly—we use nanocellulose and a polymer that has a very low impact on the environmental and people. We also use very small amounts material: the aerogel is made up of 90% air. We hope and believe that our results can help the millions of people who don't have access to clean water," says Simone Fabiano.
A cheap organic steam generator to purify water
It has been estimated that in 2040 a quarter of the world's children will live in regions where clean and drinkable water is lacking. The desalination of seawater and the purification of wastewater are two possible methods to alleviate this, and researchers at Linköping University have developed a cheap and eco-friendly steam generator to desalinate and purify water using sunlight. The results have been published in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems.
"The rate of steam production is 4-5 times higher than that of direct water evaporation, which means that we can purify more water," says Associated Professor Simone Fabiano, head of the Organic Nanoelectronics group in the Laboratory of Organic Electronics.
The steam generator consists of an aerogel that contains a cellulose-based structure decorated with the organic conjugated polymer PEDOT:PSS. The polymer has the ability to absorb the energy in sunlight, not least in the infrared part of the spectrum where much of the sun's heat is transported. The aerogel has a porous nanostructure, which means that large quantities of water can be absorbed into its pores.
"A 2 mm layer of this material can absorb 99% of the energy in the sun's spectrum," says Simone Fabiano.
Phase transitions are the domain where incremental and revolutionary change are simultaneous and identical.
Olive oil leads to discovery of new universal law of phase transitions
A simple drop of olive oil in a system of photons bouncing between two mirrors has revealed universal aspects of phase transitions in physics. Researchers at AMOLF used an oil-filled optical cavity in which light undergoes phase transitions similar to those in boiling water. The system they studied has memory because the oil causes photons to interact with themselves. By varying the distance between the two mirrors and measuring the transmission of light through the cavity, they discovered a universal law describing phase transitions in systems with memory. These results are published on April 15th in Physical Review Letters.
I can’t help but share this with other coffee lovers
Coffee changes our sense of taste
Sweet food is even sweeter when you drink coffee. This is shown by the result of research from Aarhus University. The results have just been published in the scientific journal Foods.
Coffee lovers with a penchant for dark chocolate now have a scientific explanation for why the two are a perfect match. A study from Aarhus University shows that coffee makes you more sensitive to sweetness.
In the study, 156 test subjects had their sense of smell and taste tested before and after drinking coffee. The researchers found no changes in their sense of smell, but they found that the sense of taste was affected.
"When people were tested after drinking coffee, they became more sensitive to sweetness, and less sensitive to bitterness," says associate professor at Aarhus University Alexander Wieck Fjældstad, who was involved in carrying out the study.
