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.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
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.'
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
Zuck wants Giphy
The old saw that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product" is flat out wrong. A more correct version is, "If a company doesn't have legal or competitive barriers to selling you, they will."
Google sells you by spying on you, monetizing your sensitive info. Apple sells you by locking you in, picking your pocket. Google doesn't need to lock you in because they spy on you wherever you are. Apple doesn't need to spy on you because their lockin is so comprehensive.
Facebook is the worst. They spy on you wherever you are and they try to lock you in. Which is why it's so alarming that Facebook is going to buy Giphy for $400m.
Giphy isn't just a repository for cute gifs. They're the service that inserts cute gifs when you use Twitter, Tinder, Slack and Imessage. That means that an acquisition of Giphy is a means for Facebook to spy on you while you use all those rival products.
Thankfully, we're headed into a new age of reinvigorated antitrust enforcement, and this is exactly the kind of thing that was commonplace last year and this year is Exhibit A for why these companies can't be trusted.
Cory Doctorow via Plura-list
CNN recently reported that 66% of people between the ages of 21 and 32 have nothing saved for retirement. However, according to Salon, the reason many millennials haven’t been investing in mutual funds or building up their own financial nest eggs isn’t because they’re too broke, or that they lack personal responsibility — it’s because they think our current economic system, capitalism, will cease to exist by the time they are in their 60s.
The millennials Salon spoke to expect to see a grand societal shift in their lifetime, either toward socialism — a political and economic system in which the means of production are collectively and equally owned by everyone — or toward a sort of dystopian Mad Max nightmare in which resources have dwindled, rich plutocrats own everything, and ordinary people need to band together in small, autonomous communities to survive. To conservatives’ dismay, the modern idea of socialism, which has roots in Greek philosopher Plato but emerged as a popular political idea in the early 19th century among German radicals like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, has become increasingly popular among young people in the past several years, following Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders’s underdog run for president and the authoritarian creep of the ultra-capitalist, anti-socialist Trump regime.
In contrast, capitalism has become markedly less popular among the younger generations, with The Washington Post noting in April 2016 that in one survey, a majority of young adults ages 18 to 29 said they reject it outright.
What “Capitalism” Is and How It Affects People
The bottom line, which is relevant today too, is that powerful shocks like pandemics, wars or financial crashes have an impact on society, but the nature of that impact depends on the theories people hold about history, society, the balance of power – in a word, ideology – which varies from place to place. It always takes major social and political mobilisation to move societies in the direction of equality.
Will coronavirus lead to fairer societies? Thomas Piketty explores the prospect
You don’t have creative power over words unless you can delete them.
Blogging is akin to stand-up comedy — it’s not coherent drama, it’s a stream of wisecracks. It’s also like street art — just sort of there, stuck in the by-way, begging attention, then crumbling rapidly.
I knew from the beginning that my weblog would surely cease some day, and I frequently warned readers that “blogs,” the “internet,” desktop computers, browser software and so forth, were all passing phenomena. They were indeed period artifacts, some with the lifespan of hamsters.
As the late Mark E Smith used so say, back in the heyday of punk, “you don’t have to be weird to be weird; you don’t have to be strange to be strange.” That’s good advice; if you want to become original, you should keep an eye out for whatever you don’t-have-to.
Bruce Sterling - Farewell to Beyond the Beyond
The problem with teleological narratives is that they make us ignore the fact that a huge portion of real change is made by people who didn’t intend that change to happen.
Science Fiction fights our ethical battles before we have to fight them.
Teamwork: The small things that we are achieving that feel small are the way that the civilization-wide big things happen. The more I look at history and zoom in the less it is the geniuses and the people whose names we know that made the world shift and the more it is, in fact, the microscopic – from a historical standpoint, teamwork of everybody. So never feel that the stuff you’re doing isn’t important.
Prof. Ada Palmer on Pandemics, Progress, History, Teleology and the Singularity
One way that measurement can distort the choice is by virtue of an excessive focus on what is easily measurable instead of what ought to be measured. Many graphs, for example, try to tell us how the case fatality risk for COVID-19 varies by age group. This is very important because by knowing how the virus affects young and old differently, we can devise a strategy with different solutions for people of different ages. No model, however, tries to calculate the damage of postponing or canceling elections or the damage of becoming accustomed to intrusive state surveillance. Why? Because these effects are extremely hard to measure. Metricists focus their efforts on the narrow tasks in which they are more likely to succeed, and among the most measurable things, metricists tend to focus on those that can be measured more accurately or more elegantly. But what is more easily measured and more robustly modeled is not necessarily what is important.
One crucial aspect of social life that is extremely hard to quantify is what we might call anti-aspiration. The philosopher Agnes Callard, in her book Aspiration (2018), argues that when our values change, we become, in some important way, a different person. Before becoming parents, for example, we might consider being a parent as a boring and unpleasant condition; after becoming one, however, we might well like it. In that case, our values and preferences will have changed. Callard proposes that the act of transforming ourselves from the old version to the new version is not easily understood as a “decision.” It is rather a long “transformative journey,” which Callard calls “aspiration” and which is dependent on culture and social environment: it often starts before the aspirant has any relation at all with the new value she will come to care about.
We must compare and measure, but we cannot afford the seduction of simple and elegant measurement. The tragic view, or at least a tragic sentiment, can serve as a precious and essential antidote to metricist hubris.
we must demand that our leaders understand their tragic role. They should push experts to estimate and measure the things that are hardest to measure. They should insist on an honest and full accounting of blind spots, uncertainties, and limitations. They should subject their analysis to transparent democratic scrutiny. They should question the hubris and false confidence of the most elegant models. And they must always be aware that, in the end, any critical choice will be based on some conjectures about the kind of society we aspire to be. We can’t just wish that all will turn out well. We must recognize that the right thing to do, whatever we collectively decide it to be, may require us to step on holy things—and this will get us punished, even if we are in the right.
The Tragedy of Costs and Benefits
This is a good signal of the development of a metabolic political economy - where we no-longer need land-air-water-fill but have enabled the processes necessary to transform all waste into positive input for other products.
Release the sugars! A valuable building block for making products from food waste
Almost half of what we throw away is organic waste—banana skins, a few leftovers… Most cities are collecting this type of waste separately from households. But very few cities are making good use of it. The most common treatment methods—composting and anaerobic digestion—mainly result in low-value products. SCALIBUR partners are developing a process to help cities make higher added value products from this waste stream.
To find out more, we spoke to Inés del Campo, Senior Researcher at the Biomass Department of CENER, the National Renewable Energy Centre of Spain.
What is the concept for food waste valorisation being developed in the SCALIBUR project?
The aim of our work is to release and concentrate some of the valuable components from the household waste (sugars) and to transform them into high added value compounds such as biopesticides and biodegradable and compostable biopolymers for sustainable bioplastics.
Rather than banning plastic - a better response is banning ‘garbage’ as in land-air-water-fill - garbage dumping. What is important is to re-cognize the utility of what we produce simultaneously with requiring all production to be designed for metabolic re-purposing. All output have to be designed as eventual inputs to other processes. This can radically reduce the need to parasitically harvest new sources of matter from nature.
A circular economy of plastics will reduce plastic pollution and slow down climate change
Plastics have extremely useful properties: they help us keep our food fresh, make it possible to safely operate electrical devices and create various solutions in the medical field, such as disposable syringes and artificial joints. However, because of inadequate or non-existent plastic waste collection and management as well as the culture of using and discarding plastics, environmentally harmful plastic waste ends up in nature. Additionally, the production and burning of plastic products causes greenhouse emissions that accelerate climate change.
VTT has a vision of the future in which the circulation of plastic material will be ensured through various technological and operational solutions. Plastics will no longer end up in the environment and the production and recycling of plastics will be carbon neutral.
"Plastic is everywhere in our day-to-day lives. It revolutionised our way of life and soon it will do so again. This time, plastics will be modernised through circular economies and ecodesign without compromising their performance," says Vice President Tuulamari Helaja of VTT.
"The creation of real circular-economy solutions requires us to overhaul the handling, use and processing of our raw materials streams—including plastic waste. Here at VTT, we have developed sustainable technologies and materials for the needs of the industry. Around these technologies, we can gather actors from various sectors to develop the circular economy of plastics and simultaneously create opportunities for growth and prosperity," Helaja says.
A small signal of the inevitable emergence of the digital environment as fundamental infrastructure of modern societies and cities.The key question is are we going to make the infrastructure public or privateered.
The study shows an uptake in the adoption of urban data platforms and 70 percent of the cities are now using open standards to develop their platforms. The importance of building trust between the private and public sector is also highlighted as crucial if cities are to make more use of data in their own "clouds."
Cities are becoming digital, thanks to the urban data platforms that enable it
A new study covering eighty European cities and their efforts to exploit data to monitor and improve city infrastructure shows an increasing use of data in cities. Improving city operations, enhancing environmental sustainability, informing decision-making and a wish to spur innovation and new services are mentioned by cities as main reasons for setting up urban data platforms.
Urban data platforms (UDPs) enable digital technologies to integrate data flows via open standards within and across city systems used by both the public and private sector. For example, platforms can share raw data streams or show 3-D visualizations of how underground piping, bus lines, thermal grids, environmental data and a wide range of other information is connected.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential of urban data platforms has also come to the forefront in many cities. Data from citizen self-sharing of data, traffic sensors or Wi-Fi hotspots can be used to track the effectiveness of social distancing, and to keep apart from other people when in public. Urban data platforms and the digital twin of cities could be used to bring such data together and visualize it to the different stakeholders.
With the smart cities of a digital environment of course evokes an all digital currency - this is a good brief discussion signalling the emergence of all manner of digital ways of accounting for value.
National Digital Currencies: The Future of Money?
China piloted a national digital currency in April 2020. The European Central Bank has convened a working group of major economies to coordinate digital currency research and development. The U.S. Federal Reserve said it was in the early stages of researching the digital dollar. Spurred by the potential to modernize domestic payments systems, or take a leading role in updating the global payments infrastructure that supports cross-border trade and remittances, nations around the globe are exploring the merits and risks of issuing a digital currency. While many are in the early stages of research, central banks representing one-fifth of the world's population say they are likely to issue a digital currency very soon.
The Belfer Center’s Economic Diplomacy Initiative, in collaboration with the Atlantic Council’s Global Business and Economics Program, is tracking the latest developments in central bank issued digital currencies.
This is a very good weak signal of the emerging promises of the power of stem cell therapies to deal with health challenges.
“We are going to see a lot of interesting shots on goal in the next five years. We don’t know what the answer is going to be. It is time to let the patients teach us,” says Charles Murry, a pathologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who also plans to inject cells into people’s hearts.
Revealed: two men in China were first to receive pioneering stem-cell treatment for heart-disease
The men are reportedly doing well one year on, but there is no way to confirm that the unpublished treatment using ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells works.
Two men in China were the first people in the world to receive an experimental treatment for heart disease based on ‘reprogrammed’ stem cells and have recovered successfully one year later, says the cardiac surgeon who performed the procedures. In May last year, the men were injected with heart muscle cells derived from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, the surgeon told Nature — the first known clinical application of iPS-cell technology for treating damaged hearts.
No results have yet been published, so researchers not involved in the work have cautioned that there is no way to confirm whether the treatment works, including whether the reported benefits are due to the iPS-derived cells or simply to the heart bypass that accompanied the treatment.
But the surgeon, Wang Dongjin at Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, spoke to Nature in detail about the procedure and about the patients’ conditions. And one of the men, Han Dayong, a 55-year-old electrician from Yangzhou in eastern China who received the treatment alongside a heart bypass says he is very satisfied with the outcome. Before the surgery, Dayong remembers being tired and often out of breath. Now he can go for walks, climb stairs and sleep through the night. “It was beyond my expectations,” he says.
This is an important signal of that life is definitely stranger than fiction - and also signals that life may persist in many inhospitable niches.
Current estimates, in fact, put the number of subsurface microbes on the order of 1030 cells, an order of magnitude higher than the number of microbes thought to dwell in soil or the open ocean.
And everywhere they’ve looked in that extensive realm since — no matter how deep or seemingly nutrient-poor —they’ve found life.
Inside Deep Undersea Rocks, Life Thrives Without the Sun
And while scientists are eager to uncover microbes in even less familiar territories beyond our solar system, it’s the last Earth-bound frontier on that list — the deep subsurface — where they’re now making exciting progress in their efforts to probe life’s extreme adaptability.
Lightless, barren of essential nutrients and crushed under inconceivable pressures, the deep subsurface seems unrelentingly inhospitable, yet it is shaping up to be one of Earth’s biggest habitats. Moreover, its strangeness is forcing scientists to reckon with biological systems that operate on completely different energy sources and time scales from those that we surface dwellers are accustomed to.
Scientists have spent decades studying how and where microbes persist and even thrive beneath the oceans, far removed from the sun. Most of that work has focused on marine sediments, the tightly packed mud and detritus that in places extends for kilometers beneath the water. But there’s also the volcanic rock below that, the crust itself. The life in those rocks is much more difficult to access and analyze, and samples are scarce.
Everyone has heard (or should have heard) about the “Butterfly Effect” - sensitivity to initial conditions - where the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Asia eventuates in a hurricane in Texas. Well….
Researchers find even small disturbances can trigger catastrophic storms
You've probably seen the satellite images that show a hurricane developing: thick white clouds clumping together, arms spinning around a central eye as it heads for the coast.
After decades of research, meteorologists still have questions about how hurricanes develop. Now, Florida State University researchers have found that even the smallest changes in atmospheric conditions could trigger a hurricane, information that will help scientists understand the processes that lead to these devastating storms.
The research by Carstens and Assistant Professor Allison Wing has been published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.
Here’s a signal of the state of monopoly platforms that are emerging and of the growing awareness that the digital environment requires significant regulatory frameworks to protect individuals and enable a flourishing democratic digital world.
Facebook’s Giphy acquisition sounds antitrust alarms in Congress
Republicans and Democrats are skeptical of the deal
A bipartisan group of senators are sounding the antitrust enforcement alarm Friday over Facebook’s newly announced acquisition of Giphy, a GIF-making and sharing website.
On Friday, Facebook announced that it would acquire Giphy for the reported price of $400 million. Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet and social media and messaging services like Twitter, Tinder, Slack and iMessage already have Giphy integrated into their apps.
In a Friday blog post, Facebook said that half of Giphy’s traffic comes from Facebook apps and that the gif website would be rolled into Instagram, a Facebook-owned product. In that same post, Facebook suggested that Giphy’s core function as a GIF-sharing app across social media would not change and that developers would “continue to have the same access” to its services.
The Truth is Dead - Long Live Honesty - a McLuhan-esque probe for thinking about the difference between fake news (including advertising and all major media that must deliver eyeballs and ears to advertisers) and honest accounts of the honest evidence - so that understanding can grow.
This is a good signal of how some scientists are meeting the challenge of bringing trustworthy science (which by definition can only provide ‘contestable’ knowledge) to the world.
Reaching out
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, science is crucial to inform public policy. At the same time, mistrust of scientists and misinformation about scientific facts are rampant. Six scientists, actively involved in outreach, reflect on how to build a better understanding and trust of science.
This is definitely a weak signal - of the emerging understanding and control of matter on molecular and atomic levels - for therapeutic ends and possible for other ends including wellness.
Many chemical molecules have two configurations, or chiral versions, that are mirror images of each other. While sharing the same molecular formula, the two chiral versions have different arrangements of their constituent atoms in space. The two versions of the molecules are characterized by left-handed and right-handed chiral configurations like human hands. Molecules with "left-handed" and "right-handed" chirality can have totally different biochemical effects.
Scientists eliminate drug side effects by manipulating molecular chirality
Scientists from Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have developed a novel technique that can produce pure therapeutic drugs without the associated side effects.
The approach, which uses a nanostructure fabrication device, can manipulate the chirality of drug molecules by controlling the direction a substrate is rotated within the device, thus eliminating the possible side effects that can arise when people take drugs containing molecules with the incorrect chirality.
Published in the scientific journal Nature Chemistry, the research findings pave the way towards the mass production of purer, cheaper and safer drugs that can be made in a scalable and more environmentally-friendly way.
This is another signal of the transformation of our understanding of ‘plant medicines’ that are increasingly being incorporated into the repertoire of tools used by the wellness and illness practitioners and clients to heal and undergo psychological metamorphosis.
Largest ever DMT survey travels to the fringes of psychedelic science
Encounters with inter-dimensional beings, atheists discovering belief, and the bizarre world of DMT-induced entities. A trip to the fringes of psychedelic science.
Since the turn of the millennium the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” has slowly been growing, with a number of dedicated researchers tirelessly working to legitimize a field of science profoundly stigmatized by decades of social and political disapproval. Psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, is currently speeding into Phase 3 human trials as a treatment for major depression, while MDMA, commonly known in recreational circles as ecstasy, is quite literally on the cusp of final FDA approval as a groundbreaking PTSD treatment.
These compounds, for years labelled as illegal, taboo, recreational drugs, with no scientific or medical value, are now being rediscovered for their extraordinary therapeutic potential. Psychedelic researchers are increasingly being welcomed back into the fold of large institutional structures that had for years ostracized this kind of study.
It is relatively easy for previously close-minded scientific communities to understand modern psychedelic research when it is focusing on a drug’s therapeutic value. A subjective psychedelic experience may be somewhat eccentric and obtuse, but if we can slot it into a clinical trial structure and show it to be effective in treating specific conditions, then we can legitimize it as a medicine.
And we all understand how medicines work …
