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:
The secret social lives of viruses
Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation
Articles:
Interview: Saikat Chakrabarti, creator of the Green New Deal
The housing project where young and old must mingle
The robot revolution is here: How it’s changing jobs and businesses in Canada
Data transfer system connects silicon chips with a hair's-width cable
Rethinking microchips' design pushes computing to the edge
World's first video of a space-time crystal
Researchers produce beams of entangled atoms
Solar storms can wreak havoc. We need better space weather forecasts
Genetic treatment extends fruit fly lifespan and prevents Alzheimer's damage
Paper without the microplastics: An economical and ecofriendly coating
Geneticist Rotem Sorek could see that his bacteria were sick — so far, so good. He had deliberately infected them with a virus to test whether each ailing microbe soldiered on alone or communicated with its allies to fight the attack.
But when he and his team at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, looked into the contents of their flasks, they saw something completely unexpected: the bacteria were silent, and it was the viruses that were chattering away, passing notes to each other in a molecular language only they could understand. They were deciding together when to lie low in the host cell and when to replicate and burst out, in search of new victims.
It was an accidental discovery that would fundamentally change scientists’ understanding of how viruses behave.
The secret social lives of viruses
While we find that liberal partisans are also vulnerable to misinformation, this is not a symmetric relationship: Consistent with previous studies, we also find that the association between partisanship and misinformation is stronger among conservative users. This implies that attempts by platforms to be politically “balanced” in their countermeasures are based on a false equivalence and therefore biased—at least at the current time. Government regulation could play a role in setting guidelines for the non-partisan moderation of political disinformation.
Right and left, partisanship predicts (asymmetric) vulnerability to misinformation
This is a strong signal of an emerging political-economic paradigm relevant to meeting the challenges of Climate Change and all our other local, national and global challenges.
Interview: Saikat Chakrabarti, creator of the Green New Deal
He also discovered AOC, served as her chief of staff, and co-founded the Justice Democrats
Saikat Chakrabarti is not your typical political activist, to say the least. A former finance guy and startup founder and an early engineer at Stripe, Chakrabarti left industry to work for Bernie Sanders in 2015. From there he went on to found the Brand New Congress political action committee, with the goal of discovering new political talent. One of the people he discovered was none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Chakrabarti was just getting started. He co-founded the incredibly influential Justice Democrats and the think tank New Consensus. He became AOC’s chief of staff, during which time he wrote the original Green New Deal. It was during this time that Chakrabarti and I had a…vigorous debate over the economic policies that were included in that early incarnation of the climate plan.
But when I met Saikat in person, I found out that he and I disagreed on far less than I had expected. In fact, he’s one of the major proponents of industrial policy, which is a big shift I’ve been hoping to promote for years. He has a remarkably broad, detailed, and ideologically flexible vision of American progress. In this very long unedited interview, Chakrabarti describes how the Green New Deal came to be, how he discovered AOC, and what he envisions for the future of industrial policy, American politics, and the progressive movement.
And a good signal of one effort to re-imagine how we design housing to architect new types of communities.
The housing project where young and old must mingle
Could a Swedish housing experiment that forces solo-living renters to spend two hours a week together be a solution to loneliness for young people?
The pair are among 72 people selected to take part in an experiment in collective living in Helsingborg, a small seaside city in southern Sweden. Known as Sällbo (which combines the Swedish words for companionship ‘sällskap’ and living ‘bo’), the project asks all residents to sign a contract promising to spend at least two hours a week with one another. Just under half the tenants are young people under the age of 25, and the rest are pensioners. Most live alone, although a few have relocated as couples or brought their pets along.
“We try to work against loneliness, to make people be more socially included,” explains Dragana Curovic, one of the managers of the scheme, which launched in November 2019 and is run by a housing company funded by the city council.
Curovic hopes it will improve society, “because as they are happier, they will be less sick, they will go [to the doctor] less... and they will use less public services than they do now because they can ask their neighbours for help.”
It is a truism - that everything that can be automated will be. Just look at the device in your own kitchen - blenders, mixers, breadmakers, coffee makers. It is even more honest - to realize There will never be a shortage of Work and Activity to Do and to Value When we are Engaged in the enterprise of a Flourishing Life, Community and Ecology. Everyone can create value - but not necessarily within a traditional ‘employment’ paradigm. We need an economic paradigm that recognizes the power of a state that issues its own currency - so that we can value our values.
The robot revolution is here: How it’s changing jobs and businesses in Canada
In 2017, I returned to Canada from Sweden, where I had spent a year working on automation in mining. Shortly after my return, the New York Times published a piece called, “The Robots Are Coming, and Sweden Is Fine,” about Sweden’s embrace of automation while limiting human costs.
Although Swedes are apparently optimistic about their future alongside robots, other countries aren’t as hopeful. One widely cited study estimates that 47 per cent of jobs in the United States are at risk of being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence.
Whether we like it or not, the robot era is already upon us. The question is: Is the Canadian economy poised to flourish or flounder in a world where robots take over the tasks we don’t want to do ourselves? The answer may surprise you.
A weak signal of emerging computational paradigms that enable a continuation of Moore’s Law.
Data transfer system connects silicon chips with a hair's-width cable
Researchers have developed a data transfer system that can transmit information 10 times faster than a USB. The new link pairs high-frequency silicon chips with a polymer cable as thin a strand of hair. The system may one day boost energy efficiency in data centers and lighten the loads of electronics-rich spacecraft.
The research was presented at this month's IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. The lead author is Jack Holloway, who completed his Ph.D. in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) last fall and currently works for Raytheon. Co-authors include Ruonan Han, associate professor and Holloway's Ph.D. adviser in EECS, and Georgios Dogiamis, a senior researcher at Intel.
The team's new link draws on benefits of both copper and fiber optic conduits, while ditching their drawbacks. "It's a great example of a complementary solution," says Dogiamis. Their conduit is made of plastic polymer, so it's lighter and potentially cheaper to manufacture than traditional copper cables. But when the polymer link is operated with sub-terahertz electromagnetic signals, it's far more energy-efficient than copper in transmitting a high data load. The new link's efficiency rivals that of fiber-optic, but has a key advantage: "It's compatible directly with silicon chips, without any special manufacturing," says Holloway.
A good signal of an emerging paradigm of specialized computational devices for specific aims.
"To make AI accessible to the real-time and often personal process all around us, we need to address latency and privacy by moving the computation itself to the edge,"
Rethinking microchips' design pushes computing to the edge
Responding to artificial intelligence's exploding demands on computer networks, Princeton University researchers in recent years have radically increased the speed and slashed the energy use of specialized AI systems. Now, the researchers have moved their innovation closer to widespread use by creating co-designed hardware and software that will allow designers to blend these new types of systems into their applications.
"Software is a critical part of enabling new hardware," said Naveen Verma, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton and a leader of the research team. "The hope is that designers can keep using the same software system—and just have it work ten times faster or more efficiently."
By cutting both power demand and the need to exchange data from remote servers, systems made with the Princeton technology will be able to bring artificial intelligence applications, such as piloting software for drones or advanced language translators, to the very edge of computing infrastructure.
An honest signal of the stranger than fiction world of quantum and related physics - I’m not sure what it means for the next century? But it will need imagination to find out.
World's first video of a space-time crystal
A German-Polish research team has succeeded in creating a micrometer-sized space-time crystal consisting of magnons at room temperature. With the help of the scanning transmission X-ray microscope Maxymus at Bessy II at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, they were able to film the recurring periodic magnetization structure in a crystal. Published in the Physical Review Letters, the research project was a collaboration between scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, the Adam Mickiewicz University and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poznań in Poland.
The fact that space-time crystals actually exist was first confirmed in 2017. However, the structures were only a few nanometers in size and formed only at very cold temperatures below minus 250 degrees Celsius. The fact that the German-Polish scientists have now succeeded in imaging relatively large space-time crystals of a few micrometers in a video at room temperature is therefore considered groundbreaking. But also because they were able to show that their space-time crystal, which consists of magnons, can interact with other magnons that encounter it.
Speaking of quantums of curiosity - entanglement is scaling to atomic dimensions.
If particles are entangled with each other, then even if you know everything there is to know about the total system, you still cannot say anything at all about one specific particle. Asking about the state of one particular particle makes no sense, only the overall state of the total system is defined.
Random processes can also be used to create quantum entanglement: if two particles interact with each other in a suitable way, they can turn out to be entangled afterwards. Molecules can be broken up, creating entangled fragments.
Researchers produce beams of entangled atoms
Heads or tails? If we toss two coins into the air, the result of one coin toss has nothing to do with the result of the other. Coins are independent objects. In the world of quantum physics, things are different: Quantum particles can be entangled, in which case they can no longer be regarded as independent individual objects, they can only be described as one joint system.
For years, it has been possible to produce entangled photons—pairs of light particles that move in completely different directions but still belong together. Spectacular results have been achieved, for example in the field of quantum teleportation or quantum cryptography. Now, a new method has been developed at TU Wien (Vienna) to produce entangled atom pairs—and not just atoms which are emitted in all directions, but well-defined beams. This was achieved with the help of ultracold atom clouds in electromagnetic traps.
This is an indeterminate signal - a when and not an if. With Climate Change looming - a pandemic engulfing us - humans are being nudged toward grasping ourselves as one species on one world.
A burst of solar activity unleashed a huge coronal mass ejection that just missed Earth in July 2012
A massive CME could suddenly and unexpectedly drive currents of kiloamps rather than the usual amps through power grid wires on Earth, overwhelming transformers and making them melt or explode. The entire province of Quebec, with nearly 7 million people, suffered a power blackout that lasted more than nine hours on March 13, 1989, thanks to such a CME during a particularly active solar cycle. The CME affected New England and New York, too. Had electricity grid operators known what was coming, they could have reduced power flow on lines and interconnections in the power grid and set up backup generators where needed.
Solar storms can wreak havoc. We need better space weather forecasts
Scientists are expanding efforts to probe outbursts from the sun and understand their occasionally Earthbound paths
Since December 2019, the sun has been moving into a busier part of its cycle, when increasingly intense pulses of energy can shoot out in all directions. Some of these large bursts of charged particles head right toward Earth. Without a good way to anticipate these solar storms, we’re vulnerable. A big one could take out a swath of our communication systems and power grids before we even knew what hit us.
A recent near miss occurred in the summer of 2012. A giant solar storm hurled a radiation-packed blob in Earth’s direction at more than 9 million kilometers per hour. The potentially debilitating burst quickly traversed the nearly 150 million kilometers toward our planet, and would have hit Earth had it come just a week earlier. Scientists learned about it after the fact, only because it struck a NASA satellite designed to watch for this kind of space weather.
That 2012 storm was the most intense researchers have measured since 1859. When a powerful storm hit the Northern Hemisphere in September of that year, people were not so lucky. Many telegraph systems throughout Europe and North America failed, and the electrified lines shocked some telegraph operators. It came to be known as the Carrington Event, named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed intensely bright patches of light in the sky and recorded what he saw.
A small signal of the progress toward longer healthier life through the domestication of DNA.
Genetic treatment extends fruit fly lifespan and prevents Alzheimer's damage
Modifying brain cell activity can extend the lifespan of fruit flies while also preventing the damage characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.
The researchers found that by modifying the levels of two different proteins that are active in two different types of brain cells, they could extend fruit fly lifespans by around 7-9% (close to an extra week), they report in PNAS.
The treatments also reduced the buildup of amyloid, the harmful brain proteins characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, in flies that have been bred as models for researching the disease.
A small signal of the emerging metabolic economy.
Paper without the microplastics: An economical and ecofriendly coating
Michigan State University's Muhammad Rabnawaz has created a new coating for paper packaging that's both economical and ecofriendly.
The coating, developed by Rabnawaz's Sustainable Materials Group, protects paper packaging from oil and water—making it useful for things like paper plates and juice boxes—using environmentally friendly ingredients.
"If it enters the water, if it enters the ocean, it will decompose," said Rabnawaz, an assistant professor in the School of Packaging, who shared the coating's latest formulation online on Jan. 18 in the Journal of Applied Polymer Science.
This is an upgrade over many existing paper products that rely on resilient polymers called thermoplastics to keep the underlying paper dry and sturdy when holding food or beverages.
This is really cool - you can shift the globe around and select any green dot and listen to a radio station at that location.
Radio Garden
Radio Garden invites you to tune into thousands of live radio stations across the globe.
By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.
The Garden
Radio Garden is based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Our dedicated team is hard at work tending to the garden on a daily basis. Planting seeds for the future and keeping the weeds at bay.
In 2018 we launched mobile apps for both iOS and Android platforms. In 2019 we introduced the ability for our users to search for their favorite stations and places. In early 2020, we launched a major redesign of Radio Garden. Rebuilt from the ground up as a mobile first experience, it lays the groundwork for future developments.
#micropoem
I'm too lazy to do it -
ok -
so I did it -
but only while I was being lazy -
mhm -
synecdocharchy -
a primal structure of reasoning -
pursuing trajectories -
of entailing logics -
a sensorial structure of apophenia -
accountable to surviving as -
continued effective viability -
mhm -
beyond the zero-sum game -
the afford-dances of -
scale -
intensities -
emergents -
The discernments necessary -
to value our values -
can only be accounted-accountable -
to a meta-moral-framework -
that enriches -
the viability of our complex-culture-environmeants -
OMG -
a year of enacting -
seeded sourdough bread -
and still the alchemical mystery -
of local bacteria -
purchased ingredients -
and the personal -
kitchen technology -
manifesting orgasmic delight
