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
Content
Quotes:
Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race
What Do Economists Mean When They Talk About “Capital Accumulation”?
Articles:
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability
The History of America & the World From 2000 to 2050
Common Sense Commons: The Case of Commonsensical Social Norms
The broken promise that undermines human genome research
New wearable device turns the body into a battery
Cyanobacteria could revolutionize the plastic industry
Physicists create tunable superconductivity in twisted graphene 'nanosandwich'
Illegal CFC emissions have stopped since scientists raised alarm
Meatier meals and more playtime might reduce cats’ toll on wildlife
Making masks fit better can reduce coronavirus exposure by 96 percent
Surgeon shares ingenious tip to prevent glasses from fogging up while wearing a mask
the curious paradox that political imaginaries, “in pursuing new futures, rely on the theoretical tools, language, and premises available to them, that are constitutive of the context in which they operate.” Indeed, it would seem we are incapable of escaping such a paradox given that what we are able to imagine, even the historical examples we draw upon, limit our sense of possibility.
Black radicalism suggests a poetics that can be found in the generative potential of human interaction, with all its historical contingencies and unpredictability. This involves a range of uncertainties that, if we can experience them as something other than anxiety, might unravel modes of sociality that appear deviant, fantastical or nonsensical, habits of thought that may not register as thought, but which might help us broach a reality we are presently unable to conceptualize.
Cedric Robinson and the Origins of Race
What do economists mean when they talk about “capital accumulation”? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is anything but clear, and it seems the most unclear in times of turmoil.
when theorists speak about a financial crisis, they don’t speak about it in isolation. They refer to finance not in and of itself, but in relation to the so-called real capital stock. The recent crisis, they argue, happened not because of finance as such, but due to a mismatch between financial and real capital. The world of finance, they complain, has deviated from and distorted the real world of accumulation.
According to the conventional script, this mismatch commonly appears as a “bubble”, a recurring disease that causes finance to inflate relative to reality. The bubble itself, much like cancer, develops stealthily. It is extremely hard to detect, and as long as it’s growing, nobody – save a few prophets of doom – seems able to see it. It is only after the market has crashed and the dust has settled that, suddenly, everybody knows it had been a bubble all along. Now, bubbles, like other deviations, distortions and mismatches, are born in sin. They begin with “the public” being too greedy and “policy makers” too lax; they continue with “irrational exuberance” that conjures up fictitious wealth out of thin air; and they end with a financial crisis, followed by recession, mounting losses and rising unemployment – a befitting punishment for those who believed they could trick Milton Friedman into giving them a free lunch.
In every other science, this inability to measure the key category of the theory would be devastating. But not in the [pseudo]-science of economics.
over the past century the marriage has fallen apart. The modern disciplines of economics and finance overflow with highly complex models, complete with the most up-to-date statistical methods, computer software and loads of data – yet their ability to explain, let alone justify, the world of capital is now limited at best. Their basic categories are often logically unsound and empirically unworkable, and even after being massively patched up with ad hoc assumptions and circular inversions, they still manage to generate huge “residuals” and unobservable “measures of ignorance”.
What Do Economists Mean When They Talk About “Capital Accumulation”?
This is a good article about the near? future of privacy - if we choose to create the legislative protections and technology design principles a free and open democracy needs. This is available as a pdf.
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability
Executive Summary
The problems of corporate concentration and privacy on the Internet are inextricably linked. A new regime of interoperability can revitalize competition in the space, encourage innovation, and give users more agency over their data; it may also create new risks to user privacy and data security. This paper considers those risks and argues that they are outweighed by the benefits. New interoperability, done correctly, will not just foster competition, it can be a net benefit for user privacy rights.
Enabling competitive compatibility will help loosen dominant platforms’ control over how their services are used. This may leave the largest companies, to whom users entrust huge amounts of sensitive data, with fewer ways to shut down third-party actors that threaten user privacy. But big tech companies have never been good stewards of sensitive user data, and the laws we propose reforming have never been the right tools to protect it. Making it easier for new entrants to create privacy-preserving alternatives will pressure incumbents to do better, and allow users to migrate away when they don’t.
New interoperability rules will create new data flows, and remove some of the platforms’ discretion to decide how data is shared. But mandates can come with strings attached, in the form of legal obligations for informed consent and data minimization. As a result, data that flows across these new interfaces may be more legally protected than any data that the platforms have chosen to share in the past.
In this paper, we imagine a world where interoperability and privacy go hand in hand, and abusive monopolists are not deputized to act as a private arm of the state. We can, and should, have both competition and privacy—and users should be able to enjoy the many other benefits of interoperability as well.
This is a 16min read - but is only the first part of a 5 part series - so it’s a long read. But for anyone interested in one view of then next 100 years - this is well worth the read.
The History of America & the World From 2000 to 2050
The overview from 2100 on how we solved the pandemic & climate crises, drove the global long boom, & reinvented a much better world by 2050
To mark the arrival of the year 2100, Medium is embarking on a series of deep-dive interviews with writers, thinkers, scientists, and technologists who will look back on the remarkable events of the last century. First up: Stuart Rand, a journalist working mostly for Medium for three decades from the first coronavirus pandemic of 2020 up until 2050. His work during that period — and a string of acclaimed books published in the decades that followed — helped define our understanding of The Transformation right up until today. We asked him to kick off the series by focusing on the overarching story of America in the first half of the 21st century.
This is an important concept in culture and even in knowledge management - the commons that we create with the conventions of ‘common sense’. Brett Frischmann has done significant work with Eleanor Ostrom in relation to understanding common-pool resource commons and infrastructure.
Common Sense Commons: The Case of Commonsensical Social Norms
Abstract
This chapter examines common sense, an important domain of social knowledge. Common sense helps us effectively engage with each other and our complex world, and it often functions as social infrastructure for everyday market transactions and social interactions. Common sense does not mean universal, true, or even accurate; it often is culturally contingent, varied, and erroneous (i.e., common nonsense). The chapter explores governance challenges and the dynamic relationships between common sense, social norms, and technology.
Knowledge, information and the creative commons are under threat as is the Internet itself by an enclosure movement that seeks to extend property rights to our commons of wealth in the 21st century.
The broken promise that undermines human genome research
Data sharing was a core principle that led to the success of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago. Now scientists are struggling to keep information free.
In July 2000, David Haussler remembers crying as he watched the first fully assembled human genome streaming across his computer screen. He and Jim Kent, a graduate student at the time, built the first-ever web-based tool for exploring the three billion letters of the human genome. They had published the rough draft of the genome on the Internet a mere 11 days after finishing the herculean task of stitching it all together — a task assigned to them as part of the Human Genome Project (HGP), the international collaboration that had been working towards this goal for a decade. It would still be several months before the group published its analysis of the genome in the pages of Nature, but the data were ready to share.
“The standard was that a successful investigator held onto their own data as long as they could.”
That standard clearly wouldn’t work for such a large and collaborative effort. If countries or scientists hoarded the data they were producing, it would derail the project. So in 1996, the HGP researchers got together to lay out what became known as the Bermuda Principles, with all parties agreeing to make the human genome sequences available in public databases, ideally within 24 hours — no delays, no exceptions.
Fast-forward two decades, and the field is bursting with genomic data, thanks to improved technology both for sequencing whole genomes and for genotyping them by sequencing a few million select spots to quickly capture the variation within. These efforts have produced genetic readouts for tens of millions of individuals, and they sit in data repositories around the globe. The principles laid out during the HGP, and later adopted by journals and funding agencies, meant that anyone should be able to access the data created for published genome studies and use them to power new discoveries.
I’ve been wearing digital watches for many years - and I love my current fitness watch - with sleep, step, heart rate sensors - but I always have to remember to recharge - having self-charging personal devices and sensors would be lovely.
New wearable device turns the body into a battery
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a new, low-cost wearable device that transforms the human body into a biological battery.
The device, described today in the journal Science Advances, is stretchy enough that you can wear it like a ring, a bracelet or any other accessory that touches your skin. It also taps into a person's natural heat—employing thermoelectric generators to convert the body's internal temperature into electricity.
The concept may sound like something out of The Matrix film series, in which a race of robots have enslaved humans to harvest their precious organic energy. Xiao and his colleagues aren't that ambitious: Their devices can generate about 1 volt of energy for every square centimeter of skin space—less voltage per area than what most existing batteries provide but still enough to power electronics like watches or fitness trackers.
the new devices are as resilient as biological tissue. If your device tears, for example, you can pinch together the broken ends, and they'll seal back up in just a few minutes. And when you're done with the device, you can dunk it into a special solution that will separate out the electronic components and dissolve the polyimine base—each and every one of those ingredients can then be reused.
This is a great signal of the future of medicine.
Hologram-guided heart surgery
RealView Holoscope
Get ready to enter a new dimension for medical imaging as the world’s only accurate and interactive 3D holograms equip surgeons with more accuracy.
By beaming projections of light from sources such as ultrasounds, augmented reality expert, Shaul Gelman, and entrepreneur and inventor, Aviad Kaufman, are constructing hyperrealistic images in ‘space’. Surgeons can now look through a piece of a glass to view a huge life sized 3D holographic image of an organ that is being operated on and move it around via voice commands in real time. Organs seem to ‘float in the air” in front of the doctor’s eyes.
RealView Imaging is working to address a major unmet market need in the rapidly growing domain. Its HOLOSCOPE™-i system enables doctors to ‘touch’ and manipulate images, rather than relying on two-dimensional images created by ultrasound devices or CT scans. ‘Printing’ 3D imaging data in light, in the air, in front of the physician, during the actual procedure frees the data from the confines of a 2D screen and the medic from cumbersome user interfaces and tools such as a mouse.
A good signal of the domestication of DNA for industrial manufacturing and metabolic reformulations.
Cyanobacteria could revolutionize the plastic industry
Cyanobacteria produce plastic naturally as a by-product of photosynthesis—and they do it in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. Researchers at the University of Tübingen have now succeeded for the first time in modifying the bacteria's metabolism to produce this natural plastic in quantities enabling it to be used industrially. This new plastic could come to compete with environmentally harmful petroleum-based plastics. The researchers, headed by Professor Karl Forchhammer of the Interfaculty Institute of Microbiology and Infection Medicine, recently presented their findings in several studies that appeared in the journals Microbial Cell Factories and PNAS.
"The industrial relevance of this form of bioplastic can hardly be overestimated," says Forchhammer. Around 370 million tons of plastics are currently produced each year. According to forecasts, global plastic production is set to increase by another 40 percent in the next decade. On the one hand, plastic can be used in a variety of ways and is inexpensive, for example as packaging for food. On the other hand, it is the cause of increasing environmental problems. More and more plastic waste ends up in the natural environment, where it pollutes the oceans or enters the food chain in the form of microplastics. Furthermore, plastic is mainly made from petroleum, which releases additional CO2 into the atmosphere when it is burned.
The Tübingen research group succeeded in identifying a control system in the bacteria that limits the intracellular flow of fixed carbon towards PHB. After removing the corresponding regulator and implementing several further genetic changes, the amount of PHB produced by the bacteria increased enormously and eventually accounted for more than 80 percent of the cell's total mass. "We have created veritable plastic bacteria," says Dr. Moritz Koch, first author of the study published in Microbial Cell Factories.
The advances in our understanding of the development and construction of new materials continues to advance with many implications for computational and other devices.
"If we could make these structures as they are now, at industrial scale, we could make superconducting bits for quantum computation, or cryogenic superconductive electronics, photodetectors, etc. We haven't figured out how to make billions of these at a time," Jarillo-Herrrero says.
Physicists create tunable superconductivity in twisted graphene 'nanosandwich'
When two sheets of graphene are stacked atop each other at just the right angle, the layered structure morphs into an unconventional superconductor, allowing electric currents to pass through without resistance or wasted energy.
This "magic-angle" transformation in bilayer graphene was observed for the first time in 2018 in the group of Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. Since then, scientists have searched for other materials that can be similarly twisted into superconductivity, in the emerging field of "twistronics." For the most part, no other twisted material has exhibited superconductivity other than the original twisted bilayer graphene, until now.
In a paper appearing in Nature, Jarillo-Herrero and his group report observing superconductivity in a sandwich of three graphene sheets, the middle layer of which is twisted at a new angle with respect to the outer layers. This new trilayer configuration exhibits superconductivity that is more robust than its bilayer counterpart.
A good signal in several ways - the emerging capacity to monitor the earth in all its environments and the capacity for response-ability to keep our environments viable.
Illegal CFC emissions have stopped since scientists raised alarm
Analyses suggest that China has successfully curbed production of an ozone-depleting chemical, a win for the international treaty that protects the ozone layer.
Illegal emissions of an ozone-destroying chemical once used in refrigerants and foam insulation have virtually come to a halt, scientists reported this week, nearly three years after the rogue emissions were first documented. Researchers say the result is a major win for the international treaty that protects the ozone layer.
In May 2018, researchers documented a mysterious spike in atmospheric concentrations of trichlorofluoromethane, or CFC-11, that had begun in around 2013. Production of the chemical had been banned since 2010 under the Montreal Protocol, a legally binding treaty that has been remarkably successful in curbing the use of ozone-depleting substances, so scientists surmised that the sudden increase was probably the result of a new source of illegal emissions. By May 2019, scientists had traced the bulk of the emissions to eastern China. In response to significant international pressure, the country committed to rectifying the problem.
In a pair of studies published in Nature on 10 February, scientists report that atmospheric concentrations of CFC-11 have dropped precipitously since 2018. Assuming the current trend continues, the damage to the ozone layer from several years of illegal emissions will be negligible, says Stephen Montzka, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, who led one of the studies.
I’ve taken to a daily walk to feed wild ducks (very good bread), to watch the daily gathering of murders (a flock of crows is called a murder - and every sunset murders gather in the 1,000s to settle on trees, buildings, snow banks in generally the same square km) and enjoy many other urban wild life.
Meatier meals and more playtime might reduce cats’ toll on wildlife
Simple steps to keep felines happy can also keep more wild birds and mammals alive
Estimates vary, but it’s likely that billions of birds and mammals succumb each year to our outdoor-ranging feline friends. Calls to keep cats indoors are often contentious among cat owners, and cats can sometimes reject colorful collars or loud bells designed to make them more noticeable.
But a meat-rich diet or a few minutes of hunting-like play each day can significantly reduce the amount of wildlife they bring home, researchers report February 11 in Current Biology.
Cats fed the meat-rich diet brought home 36 percent less prey, on average, than they did before the diet change, the team calculated. For instance, a cat that normally brings home a daily catch would instead return about 20 critters a month. “This might not seem like very much,” McDonald says of the drop. But “a very large cat population means that if this average were applied across the board, it would result in very many millions fewer deaths.”
Felines treated to playtime, which consisted of owners getting their cats to stalk, chase and pounce on a feather toy and then giving cats a mouse toy to bite, returned 25 percent less prey, though that drop came mostly from mammals, not birds. Cats that started using puzzle feeders actually brought home more wildlife. Bells had no discernible effect, while cats fitted with Birdsbesafe collars brought home 42 percent fewer birds, but roughly the same number of mammals, which aligns with previous research.
While I will be very happy when we no longer have to wear masks - it is good to wear them properly.
Making masks fit better can reduce coronavirus exposure by 96 percent
Double masking, rubber bands and other hacks can produce a tighter fit
Taking steps to improve the way medical masks fit can protect wearers from about 96 percent of the aerosol particles thought to spread the coronavirus, a study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. That’s provided both people are wearing masks. But even if only one person is wearing a mask tweaked to fit snugly, the wearer is protected from 64.5 percent to 83 percent of potentially virus-carrying particles, the researchers report February 10 in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
“I know some of you are both tired of hearing about masks, as well as tired of wearing them,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said February 10 during a White House briefing. But scientists have learned in the past year how effective masks can be to protect people from catching COVID-19, she said. “The bottom line is this: Masks work, and they work best when they have a good fit and are worn correctly.”
One of the most irritating things about wearing masks - is the fogging of glasses. I tried this solution and was so happy - it worked - I used a black athletic tape (so I wouldn’t look more dorky than I normally look).
Surgeon shares ingenious tip to prevent glasses from fogging up while wearing a mask
Last week, Dr. Daniel Heiferman, a neurosurgery fellow at Semmes Murphey Neurologic & Spine Institute in Memphis, Tenn., shared a selfie on Twitter in which he can be seen wearing a face mask with an adhesive bandage plastered on the top of it.
“If you’re having a hard time with glasses fogging or keeping your mask up over your nose, a simple bandaid does wonders. Learned it in the OR. Feel free to share, it may save lives!” he tweeted.
“A lot of surgeons use just regular surgical tape that’s available in the operating room, but it really irritated the bridge of my nose,” he told CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview on Tuesday. “And so I thought of using just a Band-Aid that has a little cotton pad on it that will sit kind of on that part that was really irritating to me.”
To attach the bandage, Heiferman suggested putting the cotton part of it on the bridge of the nose with half of it on the mask and the other half on the face.
#micropoem
Zombie -
natural expression of homo-economicus -
each zombie is a -
selfish-isolated-atomistic - body -
a SIA-lf -
driven by single desire to maximize satiation -
The zombie crowd - a condition -
of no society - only individuals -
each zombies the same -
SIAlf
Thinking about Hegel
The eternal question -
what came first -
the chicken or -
the egg -
misdirects -
away from the answer -
what came first -
was sex -
unaware -
awareness -
awareness-of-awareness
- un
like undead - neither alive nor dead -
or unfinite -
neither finite nor infinite -
the unfinite -
is the field of afford-dancing -
